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1. Get a great profile image
Put yourself in a good light – literally. Your face is how you make connections with people. You can use your photo to showcase your personality, your style, what makes you you.
You don’t have to spend a fortune on professional photographers or PhotoShop. Just follow these tips:
- Make sure your profile image is well framed.
- Make sure your face fills at least 60% of the frame. But break the rules if you are being creative! Mary Portas
- Choose your outfit and background carefully. Do you want the colours to match your brand for example? Check out Debbie Wosskow’s profile image.
- Consider showing yourself in action/at work. Harriet Green
- Use Canva to adjust the brightness, colours and get the right scale.
2. Get a great background image
Your background image can help show your brand, your values or examples of your work – so don’t leave it on the default blue image of lines and dots – please. It can also help tell your company story.
Here are our top tips for crafting a great background image:
- Choose something that reflects what your customer wants or needs.
- Use an image that is relevant to your geography. Carl Ratcliff
- Choose an image of your employees or place of work. Azheem Azhar
- Choose something abstract linked to your brand image. Jaimes Leggett
- Choose something that showcases your product. Melinda Gates, David Furlong
- Use graphics to display your brand messages. Emily Forbes, David Benigson, Chris Hickey, Liza Collard
- Or simply use images that shows more of your personality. Prof. Jonathan A.J. Wilson PhD
- Use Pixabay or Unsplash to find free images to use
- Use Canva to create your image and add text, graphics and images.
- Correctly size your LinkedIn header image to 1584×396 pixels, but remember its going to look different on mobile or smaller screens.
- Upload, preview and re-jig. You may need to move elements about to make sure they are visible behind your profile image.
3. Get an attention grabbing headline
Just stating your job title is a waste of prime advertising space. Use these 10 words to explain what you offer to your customer, a potential employer or prospective employees. You want people to connect with you because of what you can do, or what you can offer – so use this space wisely. If you are a sales manager – think about what problem are you solving for the customer. If you are a recruiter – what can you offer a candidate. What is your speciality?
- Look at colleagues, peers and influencer’s headlines for inspiration.
- Try to use adjectives.
- Consider who you want to connect with and use words that would attract them.
- Avoid corporate speak – make it personal and authentic.
4. Write an effective profile
This section is harder. Try not to use this as a space to list all your past achievements or job roles. Remember to include good keywords, keep it personal and show your passion. You’ve only got 2,000 characters so make them count. This is where you can sell yourself or your company and give more information that just a list of your job roles. Humanise your LinkedIn profile and make it more than just a CV.
You can read more about how to write a good linkedin summary here.
Above all make sure you avoid these buzzwords!
We find that answering these questions can help formulate an effective LinkedIn profile:
- What do you do?
- Why do you do it?
- What problems do you solve and for what group of people?
- How can you make people’s lives better?
If you need some ideas, have a look at these extremely well crafted profile summaries, but remember these are specific for their industry and have a tone of voice suited to their geographies.
5. Don’t forget to fill in your job descriptions
When looking to connect with people you often look through previous experiences. So many people, however, leave these blank or with very little detail.
- Make sure you enter details about your job role, your responsibilities and your achievements.
- Make it quantifiable to show the scale or range of your role.
- Use the STAR approach to explain your job roles. S-ituation; T-ask; A-ction; R-esults.
6. Get recommendations
If you are lacking some American bravado then this bit can be hard. We find that giving recommendations can be the best way of earning some recommendation pay back.
Its a great way of adding to your profile and showcasing your personality and services even further.
7. Add your skills
Make sure you add in what your skills are. That night shift at the supermarket will show your demonstrable team skills…don’t forget to mention them. Just make sure you tailor them and make them relevant to whatever your goals are.
If you think this section needs a boost – try up-skilling with some online courses.
LinkedIn is an underutilised resource for UK businesses. If you want help or advice to boost your company’s profile, create custom graphic or plan your marketing strategy then, get in touch with Phil on 0151 268 0382.
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