How to Optimize Your LinkedIn Profile

February 22, 2017

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Are you curious how to make your LinkedIn profile more appealing to potential clients or employers? Wondering if it’s worth your time and energy to learn how to optimize your LinkedIn profile? 

With over 480 million members, LinkedIn is still a very important platform in the world of social media. They recently rolled out a whole new design (as Viveka von Rosen alluded to in a previous podcast) and it’s important, now more than ever, to have an optimized profile. In this week’s Social Media Social Hour, I dive into the new LinkedIn layout and offer practical tips on how to optimize your LinkedIn profile. 

About the show:

The Social Media Social Hour is a podcast for marketers and entrepreneurs looking to get on the social media fast track. The podcast is an interview format, where each week I get up close and personal with top brands and influencers to talk social media, tech and online marketing. Each week I share tools that I personally use to help me with social media management, sales, marketing, accounts management, and productivity. The Social Media Social Hour is presented by Tack – Power your marketing with authentic content from customers and fans.

In this episode, here is what you’ll discover:

  • The importance of personal branding
  • How to go about defining your personal brand
  • How to best leverage each section on your LinkedIn profile

REASONS WHY YOU SHOULD BE ON LINKEDIN AND YOU SHOULD OPTIMIZE YOUR PROFILE

  • “Linked In is not a platform to forget about it. Microsoft  purchased for 26 billion dollars so they won’t let it slide away”
  • “It’s the go-to platform for professionals,  particularly in B2B space.”
  • “Pay attention to your personal brand on social networks. Current or future customers might checking you out on LinkedIn and probably all networks.”
  • “It’s a great way for you to create personal leverage for yourself from a professional standpoint.”

EXERCISES TO HELP YOU CREATE YOUR PERSONAL BRAND:

  • Get your Elevator Pitch – what makes you interesting and different (iTunes has a new show called Return of the Apps where it’s like Shark Tank but for Apps – they call it an Escalator Pitch).
  • Elaborate in detail – Who you are, what you do, who you do it for, and what they’re going to get out of it. But keep it to 3-7 sentences.
  • Brainstorm on key words for yourself – what search terms would people use trying to find you (i.e. names, skills, products, services, or even industry jargon)?

TIPS FOR LINKEDIN PROFILE SECTIONS:

  • NAME: Use your real name, save the cool trendy fun for other platforms
  • URL: Reserve your vanity URL on LinkedIn – should be same as your real, full name if possible 
  • PHOTO: Ditch the photo from college and get a professional headshot
  • HEADER IMAGE – Use an image that illustrates what you do, with something that pulls through your brand or illustrates your skills

HEADLINE:

  • Your professional headline is the line that comes up next to your name when someone searches so you can go deeper than just your job title.
  • Try to incorporate the keywords you came up with in the earlier brainstorming – take advantage of your space.
  • This is where you have to stand out with a condensed version of your elevator pitch

SUMMARY:

  • This is the place where you can take a deeper dive into who you are, what you do and who you help. 
  • Start with the paragraph you created earlier in the exercises – incorporate your key words here
  • Speak to who you’re trying to connect with
  • Be sure to break this up! No one wants to read multiple long paragraphs. Use bullet points and white space so they can easily pull out the key takeaways.

EXPERIENCE:

  • Elaborate on your experience 
  • Put former employers
  • Highlight achievement
  • List services
  • Personal differentiators
  • Add media like presentations or created content – visuals are great for social media (you can also put under your summary section)
  • The media can be documents, presentations, videos, photos – be sure to use pdfs rather than Word documents
  • Schooling – go deeper here into achievements, awards, etc. 
  • Even if you got a degree into what you do today, that’s okay because that is part of your story and it can also be a connecting point into who you are

FEATURED SKILLS & ENDORSEMENTS

  • This is your opportunity to show your credibility and thought leadership in your space
  • You get 50 skills – use this wisely – you want to be relevant skills to what you do
  • Don’t just write “Microsoft Word” as a top skill since that won’t separate you from others
  • This is like SEO for your personal brand
  • Pay attention to the Top 10  

ADDITIONAL ITEMS:

  • This area is more for freelance and contract work
  • List your publications, i.e. guest blogging gigs, or featured articles, but you don’t need to feature every single post), especially if they have gone viral or are more evergreen and relevant
  • List and Organizations & Volunteer work – 

Items/people mentioned in the show:

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