There Are Over 930 Million Users on LinkedIn, and more than 58 million companies are listed on LinkedIn. With the mention of these fascinating statistics, one would hardly resist having a Personal Brand on LinkedIn.
LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional social network on the internet. You can use LinkedIn for career and job hunting, or internship, connect and strengthen professional relationships, and learn the skills you need to succeed in your career.
Once you sign up on LinkedIn, you get various fields and sections to create your profile. Adding maximum possible information is must to create an interesting profile. Just to help you through all the fields and sections we have created this checklist mentioning best practices for each, along with few ideas to participate on the platform in an impactful way.
1. Profile picture – Your profile picture gives an insight into your personality. Make sure to keep it right. Follow certain pointers to get it right.
2. Cover picture – The cover picture helps the viewers to remember you. You can use your favorite quote, a picture of you working at your workplace, or it can even depict your industry. LinkedIn recommends using a photo with somewhere between 1000-by-425 pixels and 4000-by-4000 pixels.
3. Headline – A LinkedIn headline is the section at the top of a LinkedIn user’s profile where they can describe what they do in 120 characters or less. It should entice readers to click the profile to learn more about the user’s experience and background.
4. Current position – The current position means your designation. Where do you work? What are your roles? Adding your current position in the profile will make people more aware if they want to approach you for work. Linkedin can bring you new opportunities at work and help you grow when you put all the information.
5. Contact information – The current information is where you add your phone number and email address if you are ok with people in your network to directly connect with you.
6. About – About section is for you to tell everyone a little bit about yourself. Your work, your experience, your interests or even your position of work. You can use different keywords that are related to your work to make it more attractive and people can search you through keywords easily.
7. Featured – In this selection you can add posts, articles, links, and media- Adding featured posts, articles, links, and media give you leverage as it shows your authentic work profile. It shows what you are capable of thus giving you opportunities to showcase your work.
8. All-star dashboard – All-star is the highest rating on your LinkedIn profile. It means your profile is complete. You should fill in all the details which are relevant to get all stars on your profile. Users with complete profiles are 40 times more likely to receive opportunities through LinkedIn including job offers, new clients, new markets, new connections to centers of influence, and more.
9. Work experience – Make your work experience description crisp, use bullet points where ever possible. Start with words like responsible for, achieved, created, built, generated etc. Add experiences that can help you get better opportunities. And importantly where you can add quantifiable results add them. For example: Increased click rate by 40%, delivered 35 pages website in 10 days.
10. Licenses & Certifications – Mentioning your certifications on your LinkedIn profile is important because it is the proof of your expertise. It helps your profile visitors to understand you better so that they can connect when they need your professional expertise.
11. Volunteer Experience – Adding volunteer experiences to your profile shows that you also care about other things than work. It reflects the causes you care about after work hours. Sharing your humanitarian and philanthropic interests shows your well-rounded character that your target audience may find relatable and interesting.
12. Skills – It shows your core competencies and your expertise. Including specific skills on your LinkedIn profile is a great way to showcase your abilities to other members, such as your peers, colleagues, managers, and even recruiters. You can add a maximum of 50 skills to your profile. They’re a simple and effective way of building your professional brand and engaging your network.
13. Additional Information – It is the place where you can showcase all the hard-earned accomplishments till date to the potential professionals and visitors. The information you can add are patents, honours, test scores, languages etc.
14. Recommendations – You must give and receive recommendations due to the following reasons,
15. Interests – People definitely check the interests section in terms of the company page or public figure or community you are interested in. Although we have many interests in multiple fields, I would recommend you to stick to your profession.
16. Public URL and visibility – Using keywords related to your profession are highly advisable to use in URL and also keep relevant information visible as Google crawler can list your profile in Search Engine Result Pages for relevant keywords. How to go to public profile URL:
17. Posts– Posts are the things that you want to share with your readers to interact with you more. Posts can be about tips and you can share your knowledge on any topic. They can be about your work, motivational quotes or success stories, trending content and news, etc.
18. Participation – You can join as many groups as you want on LinkedIn. But it is advisable that you join groups which will help and benefit you in your future and growth of you and your brand. Also, gradually join the groups don’t join multiple groups in a single day.
19. Articles – Right below the post section you will find an option to post articles. Write articles this ads value to your personal brand LinkedIn profile visibility. Articles can be about latest trends, your expert opinion, research etc. Keep the article valuable and people’s appreciation to your articles in the form of reaction can have great impact on your profile.
20. Activity– Your activity on LinkedIn shows all recent posts you’ve shared, changes you’ve made to your profile and importantly your reactions to others content. So take a little conscious steps to interact with content relevant to your profile. Great section to showcase your personality.
21. Social Selling Index (SSI) – A Social selling index is a tool that measures our capability with regards to how good our profile is doing. Take this tool for guiding aspect only.
With these 21 tips, you can build a personal brand on LinkedIn that showcases your experience, skills, and personality. If you have any questions or queries regarding your LinkedIn profile, don’t hesitate to contact me. Best of luck!
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