With its more than 500 million users, LinkedIn is the professional social network par excellence in which headhunters, managers, big businessmen, entrepreneurs and human resources managers look for talent, either to recruit their own ranks or to subcontract their services as independent professionals. Therefore, whether you have a job or are a professional with your own business, it is extremely important that you have your presence on this social network well optimized. And to help you, I have created this post with the most important elements to improve your LinkedIn profile and thus boost your personal brand.
Why be on LinkedIn?
But before delving deeply into learning how to improve the LinkedIn profile, it is important that we understand everything that it can contribute to us. Thus, in case you still have doubts, I am going to give you some good reasons why you should be present in this professional social network:
- It will allow you to enhance your personal brand, connecting with other professionals who may be collaborators or potential clients.
- Promote your products/services for free.
- You can network without geographical limits. This will lead you to have a large international network of professional contacts that will help you grow and expand more easily when your business requires it.
- Although it is not the panacea for web traffic, this social network will also allow you to share content from your website/blog and thus increase visits.
- Keep up to date with the news in your sector through professional groups where interesting current debates begin.
- Know quickly the professional changes that your contacts consider, appearing a notification when they change jobs.
- Show your curriculum vitae and professional career always updated and available for professional proposals that may be of interest to you.
How to create a profile on LinkedIn?
If you still do not have your LinkedIn profile active, you should start at this point where I will explain step by step how to do it. But if you already have your profile created, don’t stop here, go to the next point!
Create a LinkedIn profile step by step
First of all, it is important that you know that you can create your company account on LinkedIn, but to begin with, the most important thing is to have a well-configured and optimized professional profile according to our business objectives. To do this, follow these steps:
- Go to www.linkedin.com
- Complete the form that appears with: name, surname, email and password.
- Click the “join now” button.
- In the next screen that will appear, indicate your country and postal code. And click “next”.
- Add your most recent position, company and sector, or mark “I am a student” and click the “continue” button.
- Go to your email and extract the verification code to put it on the next screen that appears. And hit the “accept and confirm” button.
- In the next step you can save your email so that contacts can be suggested to you or skip that step.
- Then you can connect with people, although it is better to skip this step and optimize our profile before.
- Add a professional photograph of yourself, as it can be with a white background but not the typical passport type. And hit “next”
At this time you will already have your LinkedIn profile active, however it is very important that you complete it with more information so that it is attractive to people who look for you or want to contact you. Learn how to improve your LinkedIn profile before connecting with other users following the advice that I show you below.
What information to put on LinkedIn?
Improving your LinkedIn profile will be much easier if you know all the information you can share on this professional social network:
- Work experience: Indicate all the jobs that you are interested in showing with the years of experience in each one, the company, functions…
- Education: Add your university education, postgraduate education and other courses that you are interested in highlighting.
- Volunteering: Highlight your initiatives to make a better world.
- Aptitudes: Professional qualities that you would like to highlight.
- Achievements: Publications, certifications, patents, courses, projects, recognitions, awards, languages…
- Recommendations: Get people who have worked with you to leave their recommendations regarding your professional profile.
- Others: Contact information, web, products or services, extract (bio), multimedia content…
All this information is what you can include in the different sections of LinkedIn, but before getting down to work and including it all, it is important that you reflect on what your current approach is at a professional level, to know what data to put and what is better obviate. Sometimes, it is better to have little but clearly explained information than to include absolutely everything and this could divert the attention of whoever is looking for us. Think about what your job goal is right now, and focus your LinkedIn profile on it.
How to improve the LinkedIn profile?
That said, let’s see the most important points that you should review and optimize in your LinkedIn profile:
- Profile photo: Make sure you have an image that conveys who you are and your main professional values, but is also up to date. The best thing to do is to update it at least once a year, and if possible, it should be of quality or even carried out by a professional. A photograph showing your face in a professional manner, with a white background and a medium or medium-close shot, is the best option as a general rule.
- Front page: You have a space of 1584px X 369px to put a cover with an image that highlights your LinkedIn profile and goes according to your personal brand. Although you can add texts, remember not to include too many concepts that can saturate visually. This is a space to give personality to your LinkedIn profile and where you should reflect your corporate image.
- Main information sheet: Here it is important to keep our actual position and well marked the headline why we want to be found. Don’t forget to make the most of the extract, where you can enter who you are and what services/products you offer. Finally, in the part of media content We recommend that you upload images, videos or other materials with which you can describe your products/services. At this point, for example, you could upload your company dossier in PDF format.
- Other data:
- Experience: Add all the jobs that you have had and see noteworthy, indicating the position, duration, and indicating in the description all the tasks, responsibilities and learning developed.
- Education: Indicate the most relevant training you have developed (bachelor’s, master’s…)
- Skills and validations: Write down your main skills and get your network of contacts to value them positively.
- Recommendations: Ask your former co-workers and bosses for recommendations, as well as clients and collaborators.
- Achievements: Indicate the courses you have taken, recognitions, awards, languages, projects, courses…
- Interests: Here the influencers, companies, groups and universities that you follow will be shown.
- URL: Review the URL of your profile and modify it, if you think necessary, so that it is easy to remember. For example, in all social networks I am “LauraTuero” so my URL is personalized as
- Profile in another language: If you are looking for a job in other countries or collaborating with foreign companies and professionals, consider the possibility of translating your profile into other languages. To do this, LinkedIn offers you the possibility to edit that option.
- Visibility: You will be able to modify the visibility of your profile based on the information that you want other users to see about you, differentiating between contacts, network, LinkedIn members and the public, and being able to select different types of data.
10 tips for using LinkedIn
Finally, you should know that to improve your LinkedIn profile and really bring you benefits, you will have to always keep this social network in mind. To do this, here are some good tips for use:
- If you don’t have it yet, download the LinkedIn mobile app now. It will be your best ally to respond quickly to those who contact you. Remember that you have to know how to take advantage of opportunities, and if you take too long to respond to a professional contact, you may lose that opportunity.
- Find your past and current co-workers and bosses, connect with them, and ask them for a recommendation.
- Share articles, photos, videos or ideas with a certain periodicity to stay visible among your current contacts.
- Recommend, comment and share posts from other users.
- Participate in professional groups contributing your point of view in the debates that arise.
- Network and look for collaborators whenever you need it through this network.
- Check your network updates to find out when your contacts change jobs or share some relevant information that can lead you to congratulate them and thus create sympathy.
- Create a profile badge for your website/blog.
- Update your profile whenever you can, and set a day a month to always review possible improvements.
- Get inspired by the profile of other professionals similar to you or who are your example to follow. Through them you can discover the training you need to continue in their footsteps.
I hope these ideas help you improve your LinkedIn profile and start using this network properly in order to get the most out of it. Although not everyone gives it the importance it deserves, the truth is that LinkedIn is the queen when it comes to B2B connections, so it can be an excellent springboard for you and your business.