Human Resources - Benefits Administrator

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A Step-by-Step Guide to Optimizing Your LinkedIn Profile blog.smarp.com/a-guide-to-optimizing-your-linkedin-profile-for-2019

Looking to be found or find new talents yourself? Go to LinkedIn. Looking for new

customers, partners or investors? Go to LinkedIn. Looking to expand your networks and

polish your personal brand? You guessed it, go to LinkedIn.

As people turn more and more to LinkedIn to look for influencers, prospects, partners and

new talent for their companies, your LinkedIn profile is now more important than ever.

💡Download our free "Social Media Starter Kit for Professionals" and learn how to build your personal brand on social media!

Why Optimizing Your LinkedIn Profile Should Be One of Your Top Priorities

Having a great LinkedIn profile helps you attract recruiters' attention when they're

looking for new talent to join their company's teams. Don't forget that 90% of recruiters use

LinkedIn on a regular basis!

However, LinkedIn is not only for job seekers. It's a great way to position yourself as an

expert in your industry or even as an influencer! More and more professionals use

LinkedIn on a regular basis for both professional and personal development.

In other words, your profile and your activities on LinkedIn have a great impact on your

personal brand.

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This checklist will help you get noticed by recruiters on LinkedIn:

Optimizing Your LinkedIn Profile - Step 1: The Basics

When it comes to optimizing your LinkedIn profile, first make sure all the most important

areas are in order.

Related: 5 Reasons Why You Should Help Your Employees Grow Their Social Media

Footprint

So, before you start optimizing your LinkedIn profile to the next level, make sure these

basic blocks are in order:

1. Your Profile Picture and Background Picture

Use a high-quality, professional headshot, preferably 400x400 px. It is recommended you

make this picture visible to everyone.

You can control your visibility by going to your profile and clicking "Edit public profile and

URL" from the upper right corner.

In the right-side column, you see a rundown of your current visibility options. You can

choose your profile photo to be seen by your contacts, your network, all LinkedIn Members

or "Public".

When you change your profile picture visibility to public, you make yourself easier to be

found (and trusted!) by those who look for you via search engines or other networks.

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Choose a good-quality background picture that represents you or the company or

cause you work for.

You can also choose a picture that represents something you are interested or

passionate about. The optimal image size for your background image is 1584x396 px.

2. Your Headline and Summary

In your headline, describe what you do in 120 characters or less. Be original and creative

but clear and informative.

Make sure you include in your headline the most relevant keywords, as it makes you easier to

find when looking for professionals in your field of specialization in LinkedIn.

Keep your summary brief and interesting, pay attention to keywords, and update your

summary regularly to make sure it’s as accurate as possible.

The summary-section allows you to add high-quality media, such as images, videos,

documents, and links. It is smart to take advantage of this opportunity, and add relevant

media to introduce the visitor to your work, brand or thought influencer pieces such as a

speech you gave, or a link to a news piece introducing your work.

One major trend emerging in LinkedIn is that people are starting to focus on future goals

and ambitions instead of only listing (past) achievements.

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Consider using this technique and instead of giving a narrative of your past (“15 years of

experience in social selling…”), give a glimpse of your future, or what it would be like

to work with you (“In ten years, I plan to be running the largest consulting company

regarding the health and maintenance of parrots. With care and with passion - the Parrot

Whisperer”).

This is also a good idea, if you are still at the early stages of your career, or if you are in the

process of changing careers, as you are able to shift focus to your future instead of your past.

3. Workplace Information

Don’t list all of your previous jobs, unless all of them are relevant to your current

situation. Instead, focus on the workplaces and experiences that benefit you the

most, and list your greatest achievements and areas of focus.

Remember to update your current position every once and then as well! Many people refresh

their job experience for a specific position only after they have left their post and moved on to

a new job.

Related: Jeet Banerjee: How to Build a Great Personal Brand on Social Media

However, many of us see our job descriptions change while we work, and if you are

involved in an interesting project or manage to achieve something exceptional while in your

current post, it makes sense to update it to your current job experience.

4. Your Skills

Add relevant skills, and ask your friends and colleagues to endorse you.

More is not more when it comes to LinkedIn Skills - it is better to list fever skills and gain

endorsements than to list a wide array of different type of skills but have no one endorse

them.

Make sure you update this section a few times a year as well - whenever you learn a new skill

or feel like a skill you have listed is no longer relevant to your career interests, make

changes accordingly.

Before we move on to the next step, let's take a look at 10 engaging social media facts

you may be interested in:

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Optimizing Your LinkedIn Profile - Step 2: The Pro Stuff

1. Edit Your URL

Go to your profile and in the upper-right corner, you will find a block called “Edit public

profile and URL”. Click that open.

Again, in the upper right corner, you will have

the option of editing your URL. This is a

chance for you to clean your URL and make

sure it isn’t a random set of letters and

numbers, which LinkedIn has automatically

generated for you.

If you have a common name and it’s already in use, you can still use your own name and

control the rest of the URL, by for example inserting “john-snow-king-of-north” instead of

just “john-snow”.

If your name has special characters, consider changing them to more universal

characters. This will make you easier to find through Google or Bing, and as your URL is

cleaner, it is nicer to copy or add to your email subject line or other instances.

Related: The Basics of Content Marketing: LinkedIn

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2. Certificates

Many instances giving certifications have now made it very easy to add the certificate to

LinkedIn, and you should explore this option to gain a competitive edge.

If a talent scout, media representative or a prospect is looking for someone who is

experienced in Google Analytics, for example, you can stand out by showcasing your

certificate in the matter instead of just listing Analytics as one of your skills.

Of course, adding it as a skill further polishes your expertise, especially if you gain

endorsements from your peers.

HubSpot and Google Academy, for example, provide you with certificates with your

name, the content of the certification and the certification expiry date, and in some cases,

your license number.

You can simply add the certificate to the certifications-column in LinkedIn, and input the

certificate data.

Then add the certificate URL to the last column, so people can check it if they wish to do so.

You can store the certificate where you wish, as long as you make it visible to everyone

with the link.

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3. Ask for Recommendations

LinkedIn recommendations are becoming more and more popular and important.

There are two ways to get recommendations: you can send a request to a LinkedIn contact

and ask them to write a recommendation to you (or just ask them in any other way as well),

or you can write a recommendation to someone and hope they write one back to you.

Perhaps the best way to go about this is to agree with a colleague (or other affiliation) that

you write recommendations for each other. The more precise and valuable your

recommendation, the better recommendation you can expect to gain back!

You can find the buttons for requesting and writing a recommendation by going to your

contact’s profile page and clicking the white “More…” button next to “Message”.

In your recommendation, select how you know the contact and what their position was

during your time of working together (the positions are automatically accrued based on

experience).

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These are the only mandatory fields, after this,

you are free to say what you want.

However, it is good practice to (briefly) explain

how long you worked together, how the person

you recommended used their core skills to the

company’s or project’s advantage, and what a

pleasure they are in general to work with.

Keep the recommendation brief and

preferably allow the contact to see and

comment on the recommendation before you

send it and they mark it as visible.

It is also polite to ask what the contact would

prefer to be specifically recommended on. You can also make wishes once you ask for your

recommendation in return.

4. Write Articles

LinkedIn isn’t necessarily the best place to add articles from the point of view of search

visibility, but having articles is a good way to increase your professional credibility and

improve your thought leadership position, as well as explain your professional viewpoints.

And LinkedIn articles do get indexed by Google (as long as they, and your profile, have

been marked visible to public), so as long as you search engine optimize your text, it can be

found through search engines as well.

Try to write a new article at least every three months, and activate your efforts especially if

something in your industry becomes “hot”, and you have specific and accurate

knowledge about it.

Writing an article and publishing it in your personal profile at the right time can help you

develop and maintain thought leadership position in niche topics.

Pay attention to pictures and title length - your title should not exceed 60 characters. Add

relevant hashtags to your social media message, when you publish and advertise the post.

Related: The Basics of Content Marketing: LinkedIn

If you can think of specific people who might enjoy the article, tag them in the message as

well!

The organic reach of LinkedIn articles is quite low, so adding keywords and tagging

people are good ways to increase your reach and help your article gain visibility.

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5. Optimize Your Term Weight to Increase Search Visibility

Find out what are the most common terms in your current LinkedIn profile.

Once you find that out, you are able to make the necessary improvements to make sure

you are found in the search terms that are most important to you.

There are a couple of ways you can find out and visualize your most common terms.

The easiest way is to go to your current profile and choose all text visible in your profile. You

can then go to a website which allows you to create visual word maps (such as

www.wordclouds.com), add copy-paste in your list of words, and see what are the most often

recurring words in your word cloud.

If, let’s say, you were a content marketer working in two languages, your word cloud could

look like something like this:

Run this test and if you're not happy with the results, optimize accordingly! Pay attention to

wording and using the right terminology to increase your visibility in search results.

If, for example, you are looking to make a career transition but only show up in your “old”

career skills or experience, consider focusing on new terminology in your bio or interest

areas, if you cannot yet back it up in your job experience.

Conclusion

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So there you go, tricks up your sleeve to make sure you’ll ace your LinkedIn game! If you

already know what to do but your employees are still a bit lost in social media, check out this

post: How to Encourage Employees to Be Active on Social Media.

Did you know that your employees that have a strong personal brand on social media can

outsell their peers? Download our free eBook "How to Succeed in Social Selling with

Employee Advocacy" to learn more!