Social selling and networking in your industry is pretty much a legitimate way of building your pipeline. Hence having an eye-catching and professional LinkedIn profile becomes imperative to put your best foot forward.
Here’s how to best fill out your profile
Picture
It is mostly your picture, professional headline, and name that people see. So, use a professional looking shot that allows people to recognize if they’ve seen you at a trade show or a conference. No matter what, never skip the picture and as much as you love your family, leave them out of your picture and make it a photo of you.
Headline
Don’t just name your job title. Maximize the limit of 120 characters of a headline to describing what you do and who you serve. If you say CEO of XYZ corp, no one knows what you offer. So, it could rather be “CEO of XYZ corp: Helping all B2B professionals with all their marketing needs.
This 2000 characters space is where the LinkedIn algorithm searches for keywords, so ensure filling it with all the information that you think that your target audience is looking for. Don’t forget to also jazz it up with all the awards that you’ve got or anything that makes you stand out.
The other type of media you’d want to add can be Slideshare presentations, YouTube videos, jpegs, blogs or articles quoting you or anything that gives credibility to the claims about who you say you are and what you do.
Experience
Until a year ago, LinkedIn was all about texts only, so now that you have the opportunity to spruce up your account with visuals, why not take the advantage. It’s going to do nothing but make it more attractive.
Endorsements
Yes people look at those numbers! And to build up those numbers for your most important skills, you can try endorsing other people; they endorse you back most likely. Or maybe you can just email some of the family members and close friends directly. For instance, the number of people who have endorsed me for blogging are pretty higher as compared to the number of people who have endorsed me for writing. However, if someone would ask me what I do for living, there’s a 100% chance I would say writing and 0% chance I would say blogging. I thus messaged all my close friends in my connection list to endorse me for writing and this helped me boost those numbers eventually.
Contact Information
So..it’s up to you that how easily would you want your LinkedIn connections to get in touch with you. You may not want to share them your personal number but you can always use non-primary contact information such as Google voice number or an alternate email address. It would just help you miss out on business opportunities.
Updates
Regular status updates gives your network an opportunity to connect with you. It takes seconds a day but definitely helps you become better visible on LinkedIn.
Ultimately, make a note of one thing that there’s no one right way to create a LinkedIn profile. You just got to have the basics down and if you take advantage of features that a traditional resume doesn’t offer, you are already ahead of the race to attract the audience you want.
