Avatar photo

10 Tricks to Improve Your LinkedIn Right Now

Article written in partnership with Nick Glimsdahl, Mavidea's Outside Sales Warrior

Most business professionals understand that LinkedIn is the Facebook to the business world, whether you’re trying to build new relationships, find a job, get a job, or connect with your business community – you will have better luck on LinkedIn than on any other social site.

Making an Impression

You understand the importance of LinkedIn, but frankly it’s one of those social sites that take a little more work to really get the most out of what it has to offer. To begin getting the most out of your presence on LinkedIn, no matter if you’re building relationships for sales or looking for a new career, follow these ten tricks.

11-11-14 LinkedIn Blogpost

Profile picture: Update it!

Let’s say that you attend a conference and meet a lot of great potential clients and partners. Those people search for you on LinkedIn and your picture doesn’t really resemble the person they just met – not a great impression! As a visual society, your picture will be the first indication if you’re up to date on LinkedIn. In addition, it’s best to use a professional looking picture that is just you and does not include your mom, wife, or best friend from college.

Headline: Add Keywords

Your headline is the second most important piece of your LinkedIn profile next to your headshot, making it one of the highest rated fields for SEO purposes. Consider changing your headline to include what you’re experienced in and add those keywords to your headline.

For example, my old LinkedIn headline looked like this: “Marketing Manager for Mavidea Technology Group”

Now it looks like this: “Web Design | SEO | Internet Marketing | Managed IT Services | Marketing Manager for Mavidea Technology Group”

My updated headline offers a better chance of someone finding my profile when searching for a professional living in central Illinois experienced in Web Design.

Summary: Beef it up with content. Show off your skills

Take some time to think about your strengths and what makes you better than your competition. Once you’ve narrowed down your main selling points – add them to your summary! This is the spot to brag about yourself a bit, don’t leave it blank and make sure to add content about who you are as a business professional and not just what you do in your current job position.

Here is a good example from Nick (Mavidea’s Outside Sales Warrior)

Claim your personal URL

Everyone on LinkedIn is assigned a standard URL that looks something like this "www.linkedin/in/154982039129"

You can actually change your URL to something that will be much easier to remember. With a more search friendly URL, you can use give it out during presentations, add it to your business card, email signature etc.
Watch this short video on how to change your LinkedIn URL:

Write Posts

A great new feature on LinkedIn is the ability to publish content to your profile and share it with your connections. An easy way to publish content to your profile is if you already are writing content for a blog, just copy that same content that you wrote into a post for LinkedIn to gain additional exposure and create clout on your LinkedIn profile! If you do not currently write any content for blogs/website, no problem – you can still create content and publish it on LinkedIn! Pick a subject that you’re knowledgeable about and write about it. I have seen great results so far with this tool, I love that it displays your posts prominently on your profile page, and these posts receive a lot more readership than you’d expect!

To write a post, simply click on the small pencil next to the paperclip on the right hand side of your “Share an update” tool.

Recommendations: Ask for them!

This one is pretty straight forward, similar to online reviews for businesses – this is a great way to build trust with a new client/partner. Recommendations are most powerful when they come from someone outside of your organization. This could be previous employers, clients, someone you’ve volunteered with or even previous co-workers! Recommendations can really make your profile shine.

Take advantage of website links

When creating your LinkedIn account and adding your contact information, it has a section for “websites” – you can add up to 3 website URLs. Take a few minutes and think about what would be the most beneficial to your company. Instead of just adding your company’s homepage URL, also add a few services pages – this will help your company’s SEO rankings. To make the links more interesting, make sure to give them a name that clarifies what they are and what information the person will get by clicking on the link.

Add a video presentation to your profile

Give your profile an added boost by including a video of yourself! Under the Summary section, there is a place to upload a document, video, or add a URL etc. If you have a video, go ahead and add it to your page as an extra value to people wanting to know more about you…here is my video which I just took from Mavidea’s Meet the Team page:

Get active: Provide expert content that solves problems for your audience

Share articles and news that you find interesting with your fellow connections. Contrary to some of the other social media sites, you don’t want to overshare. Posting once a day is a good amount for LinkedIn. Content should be geared toward other professionals, save your family pictures and selfies for facebook and twitter!

Manage skills

Managing your skills on LinkedIn is easy – edit your profile and then scroll down to skills and click the pencil icon in the right hand corner to manage your skills. You may want to change these if there are skills listed that you genuinely don’t know anything about, skills you have that aren’t listed and you want to add them, and lastly if you want to move the skills around into the right order of most skilled to least skilled.

Grow your personal brand with LinkedIn

LinkedIn has over 313 million members including 3 million businesses with pages. It is the #1 most used social media site for B2B businesses and 4th for B2C businesses and it’s continuing to grow. To grow your personal brand, keep your profile up to date and searchable, contribute with posts, share articles, and comment on other people’s content. Happy linking!

Related Articles...

Quality vs. Quantity 4 Tips to Effective Content Marketing

Internet Marketing in a Nutshell: The Four Types of Traffic

Google My Business

Subscribe to Blog via Email

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.