If you’re like me, always updating your LinkedIn profile and trying to perfect it, you may appreciate these 5 tips! You see, it can be easy for you to get so wrapped up in improving your employer’s brand or the brand of your company that you forget to work on improving your personal brand. This is especially true when talking about your LinkedIn profile. Maybe you are too busy, you don’t know what to say about yourself, or you just don’t want to give the impression that you are bragging or being self-centered.
Hopefully, the following five tips will help you improve your LinkedIn profile!
1. Choose the Right Profile Picture
Pictures say a thousand words. And this is definitely true when it comes to your profile picture.
Your profile picture is how you are introducing yourself to the world. You want it to be honest, inviting, and professional. Make sure the picture you select looks like you. Your face should take up 60 percent of the image. Smile with your eyes. Dress like you would at work.
2. Choose the Right Background Photo
Your background photo is the most visually appealing thing on your LinkedIn profile after your profile picture. You want it to capture a visitor’s attention. It should contextualize everything else that is on the page. Your background image should tell your visitors who you are and what is important to you.
You don’t want your profile to blend in with all the other profiles on LinkedIn. You want it to engage, capture attention, and be memorable. The background photo that you choose is going to play a major role in accomplishing these tasks.
3. Sell Your Skills and Personality
LinkedIn is a unique social network platform because it allows you to sell yourself, your skills, and your experience. Your sales pitch should be structured and tailored to meet the needs of the audience you are looking to engage with.
There is nothing wrong with consulting an expert to help you craft your pitch to appeal to your audience. You want to pitch yourself as a professional would. This means correctly setting the frame and then telling the story.
When you craft the right pitch, you are going to get a positive reaction instantly. It is going to take your profile and get it past the gatekeepers to the decision-makers. The decision-makers are the ones who can have a positive impact on your career.
4. Your Headline Should Be More Than Just a Job Title
When you scroll through the profiles on LinkedIn, you see a lot of job titles. This might be the custom, but it is not the rule. The headline is one of the first things people will see about you. Use this space creatively.
The headline could describe how you perceive the role you have. It can describe why you love the job you do and what motivates you to move forward.
If you need inspiration, look at the headlines of your competitors – or successful sales representatives. They understand marketing, so they have crafted their headlines to do more than just describe who they are. They have crafted them to sell what they are.
5. Tell a Story
It is easy to get wrapped up in using buzzwords. Leadership, strategic, passionate, focused, creative, and many more words of this sort are all over the headlines and summaries on LinkedIn. They are boring, forgettable, and easy to ignore.
Use your summary to tell a story. Don’t just list the jobs you have had. Bring them to life and show a person who is reading your profile why the skills you have matter, how they have made you a better person, and why they make you the right employee, freelancer, or temp worker for the job.
This may take some time. You might have to do a few drafts. You might show your ideas to a few people and get some feedback. But it’s worth the effort.
Conclusion
When you look at these five steps, you might think that you are going to need to dedicate days to crafting the right LinkedIn profile. But that is not true. It may take a few hours of your time, but this is a key way for you to get your professional face out there. Once you take full advantage of the power of your LinkedIn profile, it will surprise you what it does for you and your business!
For more LinkedIn tips, check out this post from StudyCorgi!
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More and more, I see LinkedIn as that proverbial N/A thing. Not looking for work. It’s not too helpful for marketing books (the site I own prohibits that [did before I took it over; I continued that].)The networking it offers seems irrelevant to a self-published author. For the rest of the professional world, however, I can imagine LinkedIn still has value. It had more before Microsoft bought it a few years ago and made groups sort of an afterthought.
It can be good for people looking to work as editors, publishers, or freelancers. But not so much for Indies looking to promote their books!
That is so!
Excellent tips. And something I know I must change up. Thanks. 🙂
Lol – same here 😀