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Top 10 Tips for Your LinkedIn Profile
Top 10 Tips For Your LinkedIn Profile
Approximately 80% of business connections made on social media are made on LinkedIn. If you are looking to expand and connect with your network, or are in the market for a new job opportunity, it is important to maintain an awesome LinkedIn profile. Here are our top 10 tips for creating a winning LinkedIn profile:
- Include a photo: If I see a silhouette instead of a picture, I immediately assume that the user is not active and I don’t view the profile. Profiles with a photo are 14X more likely to get viewed. Use a photo that is current and professional looking (meaning it’s not your dog and it doesn’t look like your friend and a beer were cropped out for the sake of posting).
- 2. Keep your headline short and direct: Add a description that is straight to the point. The headline is meant to pull people in, not to tell your whole story. Capture their attention with one brief statement.
- Use relevant key words in your summary: People search on key words. Use key words to increase the likelihood that you will show up!
- Throughout your profile, use bullets instead of paragraphs. People like information in short snip-its. Just the sight of paragraphs can lead to TLDR (too long, didn’t read). Don’t let that happen to you!
- List your professional skills: Include all skills that are relevant to you. You can change the order of your skills so they are in the order that is most relevant.
- Keep it up to date! Your LinkedIn profile should be an accurate reflection of what you are doing. As soon as something changes: position, company, education, volunteer experience, publication… update your profile. You don’t know who’s looking at any given moment so you want your profile to reflect who you are in that moment.
- Be active: Check in daily. People are most active on LinkedIn between 10:00 – 2:00 ET.
- Join and be active in groups: Groups are a great way to connect with others with like interests. You can join up to 50 groups.
- Include your education, extracurricular activities, and volunteer experience: All of these provide important information to potential employers. If you are just starting out, these may be considered as heavily as past job experience.
- Send personalized requests to connect. Include how you know/where you met the person or why you would like to connect. Including something personal about that person (I read your book…, Your post about XYZ resonated with me because…, I see your worked with XYZ, I’d love to know more…) will make you stand out above the crowd.
Use these tips and get to work on your LinkedIn profile. People are waiting!
For more information, check out the following sites:
https://www.themuse.com/advice/linkedin-profile-tips
http://linkhumans.com/blog/tips-linkedin-profile
http://www.inc.com/larry-kim/22-top-tips-to-effectively-raise-your-profile-on-linkedin.html
https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/linkedin-profile-perfection-cheat-sheet