LinkedIn is the go-to social network for talent recruiters. With an online community of 500 million users, it links professionals and businesses all around the world. You probably already use it to find work, but are you really making the most of it?
Opportunities have to be attracted and nowadays developing personal branding and showing your professionalism can help you to give a push to your working career.
LinkedIn is not a simple transposition of your online CV: filling in your profile and then waiting for companies to call you is practically useless. As in any business situation, the successful approach asks you to be proactive and to commit yourself first to making your profile interesting, in order to bring users to you.
In this post, our coworker and Social Media Specialist, Tommaso Bianchini, leaves you 5 tips to improve your Linkedin profile.
Tips 1 Define your goals and create your own editorial plan
To start with, think about where you want to go, set achievable goals.
They can be finding a better job, finding new clients, networking with other professionals in the sector or increasing credibility in your company.
Once you have set your goals, you have to reate your own editorial plan, in which you define what content you are going to share, in what format and on what day.
Tips 2 Do some quality networking
LinkedIn is great for keeping in touch with fellow sector professionals. Contact and interact with influencers and the most relevant companies according to your strategy. All you have to do is…
Create your own network of professional contacts in your sector.
Pay special attention to people who are super connectors in your sector (users with over 500 contacts), recruiters, Owners, CEOs of interesting companies and influencers on the platform who always share high-quality news and content.
Join groups related to your professional profile and try to interact on a regular basis. Share content, make comments, recommend others.
Treat your contacts with care.
Always send customized messages, congratulate people for their achievements and novelties, interact with their posts and, most importantly, keep your inbox up-to-date.
Bonus Tip: Try to add 10 people each day who might be relevant to the goals you want to achieve.
Tips 3 Take advantage of the Pulse function
Linkedin Pulse is a blog linked to your personal profile. A blog that allows you to enrich your profile with content that highlights your experience, your training, your areas of professional interest.
Use it to share your main content (so-called pillar posts) as a case study, your own success story or about your client, best practices and guides.
Tips 4 Be constant and consistent
We all know that it costs time to create content and have an up-to-date Linkedin profile.
But try to be consistent in your publications and above all try to give value to your audience.
Don’t just recycle content from other sources, but create something of your own at least once a month.
Don’t worry if you don’t find any inspiration at first, it’s all about training, testing formats, content and automating your creation workflow.
To grow on Linkedin you don’t need ‘dumb’ posts, i.e. posts like In this image, in which no personal judgement is expressed.
It is a missed opportunity, with the mute sharing of a content that has already been shared by others.
It is recommended to give priority to the quality of posts over quantity.
To find inspiration I leave you with a few platforms where you can study, find inspiration and stay up to date:
– Medium
– Feedly
– Quora
– Google Alert & Google Trend
Tips 5 Optimise the cover image, the headline and your description
Summary and about section: your business card
The summary (or headline) is the 120-character text you find below your first and last name in your LinkedIn profile.
It should make it immediately clear to our interlocutors what we actually do.
In most cases, however, it is mistakenly reduced to a mere description of one’s own job title.
To simplify, we can distinguish two main types of summary:
1 – Standard with details
2 – Creative
The first, the standard one, is a summary that, while also including the job title, adds a few details, key words or a phrase to make it more understandable, to specify it better.
The second, the creative one, does away with the title and uses the whole space as if it were a real advertising headline, a slogan!
Let’s see some examples!
Before:
Office manager at company XYZ
After standard version:
Office manager at company XYZ | Secretarial, administrative and office management
After creative version:
Work smart! My job is to organise spaces, people and needs in the company, to increase productivity in the office
Last but not least, the cover (or background) image.
It helps to communicate the image that you want to give of yourself or your company, so it is good that it recalls the work context or is linked to your business.
But be careful with the size: it is not uncommon to find cropped or off-centre images that do not fit into LinkedIn formats.
Here are the LinkedIn sizes for cover images:
Profile: 1584X396px
Company page: 1128X191px
Now that you have reached the end of this article, it’s time to start using Linkedin in a professional way and you will see the first results after just a few months.
And most importantly, if you have any other tips for improving your Linkedin profile, write them down in the comments.
Written by Tommaso Bianchini | Social Media Specialist at Rocket Digital
