LinkedIn continues to innovate even years after launch, especially with Microsoft’s acquisition of the platform. Despite a number of other social channels rising to meet consumer demands LinkedIn remains the leading social network for marketers and business professionals.
It’s more than just a digital rolodex, and with each new feature that is tweaked and added LinkedIn improves as a channel for B2B traffic and lead generation as well as hunting ground for new career opportunities.
In this post, we’ll dig into the features and updates you should have on your radar to get the most out of marketing yourself and your business on LinkedIn.
Setting Up Your Professional Profile
The first step toward creating and optimizing an effective LinkedIn profile is tackling the basic information. Before you get into defining skills and building out an impressive portfolio you need to let people know who you are.
Making a solid first impression starts with your name and your headline.
LinkedIn frowns on the name field being used for anything but your name, so avoid filling that space with clever keywords.
Instead, focus on the headline field for that. This headline field, in conjunction with your name, shows up in various places throughout LinkedIn including search results…
As well as invitations to connect, messages, and the newsfeed updates seen by everyone in your network.
This makes your headline an ideal point of optimization for specific keywords that may be related to your career, position, skillset, company, etc.
This is also a great space to use as a tagline that can help set you apart from other candidates and professionals within your field.
Contact Info
In previous versions of LinkedIn information such as your website was hidden away in a “contact info” tab.
With more recent updates the contact information is now front and center at the top of the profile, though it’s nested until a person clicks to retrieve the full data. Update this segment with the information you want to share with other professionals such as your website and blog URL, or your Twitter handle. You can also include your phone and email address.
Summary
The summary section of your LinkedIn profile allows you to enter a summary of your professional experience and expertise. You have a few paragraphs to describe yourself to a prospective employer, partner, customer, or connection. From a professional standpoint, think about this segment as your elevator pitch – what would you say to someone in person about who you are and what you do?
When updating your profile and summary segment you’ll also have the option to add media to the top of your profile. While media can be added under individual career listings, those you’re particularly proud of can be positioned at the top to establish expertise and branding.
You can add YouTube videos, Slideshare presentations, and other media (images, videos, audio, presentations, and documents) from these service providers. Mari Smith uses her media to establish expertise and branding.
Here are just a few ways you can use visual profile elements to market yourself on LinkedIn.
- Speakers can link to presentations from Slideshare to show topics they cover and videos from YouTube to show clips from their latest speaking engagements.
- Graphic & web designers can link to Behance to show off their portfolio.
- Consultants who help businesses build traffic for websites can link to Quantcast profiles for the sites they have helped.
- Entrepreneurs can link to their Kickstarter project to encourage more funding for their ideas.
- Podcasters can link to their best podcasts.
- Photographers can link to their best portfolio photos on Pinterest.
- Authors can link to documents with writing samples.
The list is endless…
Current and Past Job Experience
Your current and past job experience is another area that LinkedIn uses to determine what keywords your profile should rank for. It also comes up in some other areas of LinkedIn like search results and employee listings on company pages. Therefore, it’s a good idea to utilize keywords that you want to rank for in the job position titles and descriptions.
Avoid being heavy-handed with keyword use. While ranking is important, you don’t want to detract from the skills and experience in this section.
Beyond keyword optimization you can also add media to each job experience listing. Like your summary, these visual enhancements can help solidify your authority and expertise around specific topics and industries.
Here’s an example from the profile of Wordstream’s founder Larry Kim:
Skills & Expertise
When you add your skills and expertise to your LinkedIn profile you’re not only optimizing for those keywords, you’re also creating opportunities for endorsements. Other users can review your skills an endorse you, which are much easier to attain than detailed recommendations. Visitors and connections can endorse you for multiple skills with just one click.
Visitors then can see all the skills others have endorsed you for, adding an element of social proof to your expertise.
You will receive notifications when others endorse you, giving you the opportunity to reply with a thank you, and even provide endorsements to return the favor.
Since others receive the same notification you can encourage endorsements on your own skills by taking time to regularly endorse your connections.
If you’re not sure what skills to add to your profile, you can visit the LinkedIn Topic Directory. Browse the alphabetized list to choose skills that are most relevant to your experience.
When you click on a skill/topic you’ll be taken to a page showing relevant companies and the top subtopics for each or related skills. There will also be a list of professionals ranking for that particular skill. If a skill is relevant to you and you’d like to list it on your LinkedIn, just click on the “add to profile” button on the page.
You can also use the “add skill” option within your profile to start typing in skills or click on suggested skills provided by LinkedIn based on the information you’ve already entered on your profile.
Note that you can only list 50 skills, so be sure to choose them carefully. If you notice some that are not applicable or have a low endorsement rate, remove them to make room for more relevant ones.
Accomplishments
LinkedIn has combined a number of segments such as publications, organizations, and more into a single “Accomplishments” section to enhance your professional profile.
If you have written reports, white papers, or books, you can add them to your publications section. This section is unique because you can include a direct link to your publications on your website, Amazon, or any other site you choose. This can help you draw attention anything you’ve written, including free ebooks you use as lead magnets for your mailing list.
There’s a substantial list of accomplishments to choose from for enhancing your profile.
Updating Your Professional Profile
You can make status updates on your professional profile similar to the way you would on Facebook and Google+. You can share links as well as tag people and companies relevant to your update. You’ll find the blank post segment at the top of your home page feed.
When preparing to make a post you can opt for a general text post or one that includes media (images and video) or a link, like the example image above. You can also choose to publish an article instead, which will open a new draft in LinkedIn Publishing.
Articles you publish can be featured at the top of your profile next to your activity feed while also promoted out to your connections.
They’re also discoverable in LinkedIn search as well as organic search.
Growing Your Network
Once you have set up your professional profile, you will want to start building your network by connecting with others. First, you will want to see who you already know on LinkedIn using your email address book.
You can also use the people you may know browser to find more connections based on the people in your network.
Once you have exhausted the list of people LinkedIn thinks you know, you can branch out to others. Be careful about who you send connect invitations to. LinkedIn encourages you to only connect with people you really know. If you receive spam flags from sending invitations to people you don’t know LinkedIn may suspend your ability to connect with others.
As you go through LinkedIn, you will see different annotations by people that show your connection to them. First degree connections are those people in your network. Second degree connections are those people who are connected to people you are connected to. Third level connections are connections of those second degree connections.
People who are in one of your groups are annotated as group.
The next way to connect with others is through groups. When you belong to the same group as someone you want to connect with, you can include a note in your connection request that you share similar interests and belong to the same group so they recognize that it’s not just a spam request.
It’s best if you have engaged with them a little first within the group and then send a custom message letting them know that you like their posts and want to connect.
You can find new people to connect with in the groups themselves by looking through active discussions or look at the groups/interests your desired connection belongs to, join a group, and then connect with them.
You can also attract new connections by linking to your LinkedIn profile on your website and anywhere that allows you to connect to other social networks or by cross-posting your LinkedIn profile URL to those social networks.
To learn more about LinkedIn’s policies and strategies to connect with others, visit their pages on Building Your Professional Network.
Increasing Recommendations
Your next goal once your profile is complete and you are making connections is to get recommendations for your work. These are essentially LinkedIn testimonials that are attached to a specific job exper
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