LinkedIn has the reputation of being the boring brother of Facebook or Instagram. Nevertheless, LinkedIn is extremely useful for keeping in touch with your professional network and for keeping abreast of the latest developments within your industry. In addition, the platform is increasingly being used for recruitment! Do you simply want to raise your profile within your network, or are you ready for the next step in your career? These tips will get you started!
7 Awesome Tips to Make a Great LinkedIn Profile
1. Professional photo
Profiles with photos generate a lot more hits within LinkedIn, and a better photo also leads to more positive results. For your LinkedIn photo, it is certainly not a superfluous luxury to hire a professional photographer to take a few good studio portraits from you. Create a business look for your portrait. Wear clean lines and pay extra attention to your hair and jewellery. Less is always more, here is the message. That does not apply to a shiny forehead. That belongs to the photo faux pas. Although you keep your background quite neutral, it doesn’t hurt to experiment with an original background colour that highlights your personality and desired functions. If you go for a position in the financial sector, then you should opt for a more conservative colour, such as white, or possibly blue. Creative marketing professionals can then let themselves go again and choose orange or yellow. This is how you reinforce your profile! In addition, you are not tied to the same boring blue LinkedIn background, and you can also opt to personalize your banner. As with your profile photo, choose a quality image that appeals to the imagination and demonstrates your affinity with your sector, or a photo that immediately highlights your qualities.
2. Adjust your URL
It is in fact much easier to find your – admittedly – fantastic profile when you have your own URL. In an ideal world, it reads as “linkedin.com/name” instead of the alphanumeric combination with which LinkedIn saddles you. How can you also get such a nice URL? Simple, you just click at the bottom of the grey box of your profile which contains your most basic information. There you will see the magic words “edit public profile”. When you click on that, you will be taken to your public profile page. Again at the top right, you can adjust your URL to an easily findable link. That way your talent will certainly not be spared!
3. Update your headline
Your headline is next to your photo, perhaps one of the most crucial LinkedIn profile elements. Your network or your potential new employer must immediately have an idea of who you are and the industry in which you operate with a glance at your thumbnail. Therefore, avoid meaningless titles as “partners at ABC Inc.” That can mean anything. Are you a lawyer there? A customer centricity officer? Perhaps a data scientist? We will never know unless we click on your profile. However, most social media users are too lazy for that. So think about a headline that immediately catches your attention. “Transforming organizations/entrepreneur/keynote speaker” is an example of such a good headline. Your short bio (summary) should have around three to five short paragraphs, preferably with a few bullet points to anchor the tired eyes of recruiters. Your bio must tell your profile visitor more about your business passions, your unique qualifications, and your most important skills. If you have relevant multimedia content about your own person, you should also share it in this section.
4. A clear focus
There are those people who are really good at everything. The term “handyman” seems to have been invented for them, and you secretly envy those oh so versatile people. However, this versatility can also have its disadvantages, certainly if you want to emphasize that extra in your LinkedIn profile. Therefore choose a maximum of three titles for which you want to be known. For example, you can choose to profile yourself as a Digital Transformation Officer, with special knowledge in AI, who also provides keynotes at events in his free moments. Therefore, make sure that your skills also clearly underline those key concepts in your profile. So it certainly doesn’t hurt to remove less relevant information from your profile. The high school where you have studied Latin mathematics doesn’t really matter unless of course, it is a highly reputable institution. You can even choose to remove less relevant work experiences from your profile, especially if they do not contain the keywords for which you want to be known to your network. Of course, you can state that you have a special talent, even if that is not in line with the rest of your profile. If, in addition to being a marketing manager, you have also obtained a coding certificate, it is best to mention it on your profile. This way you might end up with the right job!
5. Be active!
Be active on LinkedIn! If you often like posts, comment on them, or share them with your network; the LinkedIn algorithm will be grateful. User engagement is an essential element of LinkedIn’s business model. Make sure you only share business content. A selfie at a B2B event is just possible, but photos of your cat are a bridge too far. Keep that completely useful information for your Facebook friends or your Twitter followers. LinkedIn is anything but a passive medium. In addition to actively making connections and liking and sharing posts from your network, it is important that you are known as a specialist in your field. You do that by distributing interesting content that really benefits your network. Even better is that you produce your own content (as in; writes). LinkedIn has a publishing platform for a reason! When you produce interesting and original business content yourself, you stand out faster.
6. Add projects, volunteer work and languages
Do you speak an exotic language? Add them to your profile and blow every profile visitor off his socks! Do you engage as a volunteer in an orphanage every weekend? Don’t be a silent benefactor and blast it through the big LinkedIn trumpet. Do you have a data science degree? Shout it from the rooftops! This is the perfect profile component where you can distinguish yourself. Make sure that the focus within your profile remains sufficiently clear. This is the perfect section to distinguish yourself in!
7. Hunt for endorsements and recommendations
Another crucial but far too little element used on LinkedIn is the endorsements and recommendations that you can receive from your colleagues. The psychology behind it is simple; you can find yourself a lot, but when a third party personally testifies about your qualities, they also take on a certain responsibility. Someone does not do that if they are not convinced of your abilities. It is also recommended to actively pursue such endorsements and recommendations. If an employee or superior gives you a compliment about your work, do not hesitate to immediately ask them to put the deed to the word and also make those praising words public on your favourite business platform. If you’ve already been so cheeky about asking for a recommendation, feel free to go a step further by also requiring your co-worker or superior to be as specific as possible in his recommendation. No one really benefits from a general recommendation that goes no further than “Franklin is a fantastic colleague to work with”. Apart from the fact that that is the undeniable truth, that recommendation remains fairly flat. Your endorsements are also an excellent way to highlight your talents. Make sure that you keep the focus here too. Too many skills on your profile make it harder to radiate the desired image. Fortunately, LinkedIn offers you the option to choose which skills are immediately visible on your profile. So it’s better to select the endorsed talents that you really want to be known for. So if you want to be known as a top-of-the-bill marketing strategist, then you don’t want a cognitive manufacturing skill to be the first talent people see. So when someone on your network ends up on your profile page, they will only see your most relevant skills.
