From the first day of Facebook to today, when there are so many social media platforms, profiles have always been important. It is even more important to know how to optimize your LinkedIn profiles for the very nature of the platform. 🚀
Let’s see how and why you need to do so. ⤵️
The Importance of LinkedIn Profiles
We all know LinkedIn is one of the most professional social media platforms. With more than a billion users, this social network is one of the most popular platforms, and thanks to its nature, it has become a huge center for business. So, you need to know how to make a good LinkedIn profile.
You can find anyone on this platform: a job seeker, recruiter, investor, CEO, founder, mentor, etc. Well, they must somehow be separable, right? This is where a LinkedIn profile enters the equation.
A profile is not only your identity on LinkedIn; it is also a way for people to find you on this social media using the keywords you have used in your profile. Many recruiters may see your profile and message you only because it is fully optimized.
Profiles are such a serious matter that when you search for any information about them, there are hundreds, maybe thousands of websites that have written about how to create a good LinkedIn profile, just like we offered a full guide in our e-book “Cook the Best LinkedIn Profile for Recruiters.”
Your profile is like a sword you carry in a battle when you are active on LinkedIn. But you should know that the sword in your hand is double-edged. It can pave the way for you to be more successful on LinkedIn or scare people you’ve attracted away. This article discusses optimizing your LinkedIn profile for the best results.
To optimize your LinkedIn profile, utilize a professional photo of yourself, develop a strong headline, and include a summary summarizing your skills and accomplishments. Include key work experience and certifications, and ask for endorsements from others and/or recommendations for top skills.
Read the next parts to find more. ⬇️⬇️⬇️
The Profile That Defines Your Destiny
Your profile tells others who you are, what skills, education, and experience you have, whether you have a product to offer, and so on. That is why you must ensure your profile is good and complete.
The thing about LinkedIn profiles is that they are visible to all LinkedIn members and cannot be turned private like Instagram. That’s why LinkedIn notifies you when someone sees your profile; it can be important for some people, you know, in business terms.
The LinkedIn profile has many sections you can easily manage and rearrange. From the title you use to introduce your expertise or profession to your profile picture, education, job experiences, skills, awards and honors, etc. All of them are adjustable and, in turn, important in your profile and impact your success on LinkedIn.
As George Orwell said in Animal Farm, ❝All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.❞ The same is true for LinkedIn profiles! All sections are important, but some are more important than others, and we discussed them exclusively in “Cook The Best LinkedIn Profile for Recruiters.”
For example, the title and the keywords you use in it are the elements of your visibility, and your search ability depends on them. For example, those seeking a network analysis specialist do not do this with first and last names but search with keywords.
Another example would be your job experience. This section is so important that most people who enter your profile review it. Well, does that mean we should spend less time on other parts? Not at all. As I said, all parts of your profile are important, but some sections are more effective.
For instance, it may not matter to someone where you worked but what skills you have or where you studied. Maybe someone wants to see your portfolio or see if you have anything published. But you should know that according to statistics, the average time people spend on a single profile is no more than three minutes. That means most of them do not review your whole profile.
The Sections That Have Priority in LinkedIn Optimization
Let’s see what we need to do to optimize the profile in different sections. Since LinkedIn profiles have so many sections, I covered the more effective ones.
As the famous proverb says, The journey of a thousand miles starts with the first step you take; your step in optimizing your LinkedIn profile can be choosing a good headline, but honestly, the first thing that recruiters, investors, prospects, etc., see in the search results is your profile picture, so:
1. Choose a Suitable Profile Picture
No matter how good the rest of your profile is, your profile photo is the first thing anyone sees on the search results page. A bad photo can ruin everything, while a good photo can make you stand out from other members.
According to LinkedIn, a suitable profile picture can increase the number of your profile views up to 21 times, and this means 21 times more chances to succeed in reaching your goal on this platform. Well, it has some tips we have to discuss here.
Since we are talking about the photo, you should pay attention to the background photo too. This picture is not as important as the profile picture, but choosing a suitable picture can tell your target audience exactly what character they will face.
I suggest you to choose an original photo for the background that matches your chosen headline. For example, if you are a digital marketing specialist, use a board with social media strategies as your background picture.
Remember that this picture should be something special and attractive, not as if they are sitting in a classroom! 😉
2. Headlines Are Way More Than Just a Title
The headline format is not like a Bible verse that cannot be changed! No one said you can only write what you are doing; you can leave it to your job experience.
As LinkedIn Business says: ❝Use the headline field to say a bit more about how you see your role, why you do what you do, and what makes you tick. If you’ve got sales reps at your company who are on the ball with social selling, then take a quick look at their profile page headlines for inspiration. They will almost certainly have more than their job titles in there.❞
3. Summary
This section can be your introduction to LinkedIn. You might say, “Well, if I leave this section empty, will something bad happen?” No, you will not get struck by lightning, but you are depriving yourself of a golden opportunity to discuss yourself in your profile summary. It has always been strange that some people choose not to complete the summary section.
Anyhow, it is better not to list only what you have done or your skills. Describe why you think you are different from others, and tell the visitor why working with you is useful for them and why they should invest in you based on your profile summary.
Get ideas from the influencers’ summary section. This section can be the most personal part of your LinkedIn profile, and it definitely worth your time.
Buzzwords like “expert,” “leader,” “experienced,” “passionate,” etc. are used too much as keywords, and using them alone will not convince your target audience that you have this feature. Instead, it’s better to play with keywords a little, for example, “As a business consultant expert, I turned a company from scratch into one of the top 100 shipping companies in the world.”
4. Skills
LinkedIn has a long list of skills you can have in your profile; you just need to know how to add or remove them. This can help give credibility to the claims you make in your headline and summary, especially if you relate them to your job experiences.
Another benefit is allowing your current and former colleagues and managers to endorse these abilities. You will not believe me if I tell you how many recruiters use skills as keywords and how many go to this section when reviewing candidates’ profiles first.
5. Connections
Your connections network is your treasure on LinkedIn. Your connections are the ones who can
create countless attractive opportunities for you, whether through marketing, Skill endorsement, or sending recommendations in your profile. So take the time to build a large network of the most worthy connections because it is worth more than you think.
6. Job Experience
You are trying to succeed in your business by using LinkedIn’s features. So, it doesn’t matter whether you are a job seeker or a CEO. You should tell others where you worked, what
experiences and achievements you had in those jobs, what position you held in those
companies and what you did for them, etc. It should be done in the job experience section because it is the most visited section of your profile. It is so important that we dedicated a full chapter in “Cook The Best LinkedIn Profile For Recruiters” to job experience.
7. Take a Skills Assessment
This test will not only help you test your skills, but at the end, you will also get the LinkedIn-approved skills badge, which you can add to your profile. It may not seem like much, but this little virtual badge can have much more impact than someone endorsing you.
8. Recommendations
Well, recommendations help you build a strong profile more than you think. They are valid testimonials showing how problem-solving, skillful, and professional you were in your previous jobs.
Fortunately, LinkedIn has considered this and provided a separate section for these recommendations, making it much easier to request them. I suggest you get in touch and see whose recommendation is more beneficial and valuable for you and what you want to do.
The sections mentioned above were the most important parts of your profile to optimize, but what is the point of all this effort?
Optimizing LinkedIn Profile Benefits
LinkedIn is one of the most popular social platforms, and an optimized profile can change many things. This platform has over a billion users, so several people may visit your profile daily. They can be new, old, or future colleagues, recruiters, potential customers, investors, etc. So, having a powerful profile can have many benefits for you.
Let us take a more precise look at some LinkedIn profile optimization benefits. 👇🏼
1. Visuals
LinkedIn is a visual alternative to traditional resumes. It allows job seekers to add photos and videos to their profiles to showcase their experiences, awards, news, articles, mentions, etc., much better.
2. Personal Brand
A strong profile shows that you value your brand. It also means that you are technologically knowledgeable and know how important it is to be active on social networks.
3. Showcasing
Another benefit is that you show that you have significant achievements, experiences, skills, and education that you can share. This one thing is very useful for recruiters.
4. Right Connections
We have limited connections on LinkedIn, so we always recommend choosing wisely. An optimized profile can attract the right people to you; they might even like your profile enough to hire you or try to have other business relationships with you. Just choose the right keyword.
5. More Easily Searched
With an optimized and strong profile, you will be more easily searched in your industry. People don’t pick up the lantern and look for you in the dark. If they are looking for a marketing strategy expert, they will search for that and probably hire one of the first page results. A complete profile has a better chance of landing on the first page.
6. Job Search
As much as we can say that LinkedIn can be used for various tasks, the main task of this platform is to find a job. The job you find might be completely based on your skills according to the profile you create. Because you can get connected to the people, you need to get the job you want.
7. Your Resume
In other articles, you may have seen me or others say that LinkedIn is no longer just a simple storage of online resumes. This claim is true because this platform has other attractive and powerful features. But as they always say, ashes to ashes, dust to dust; in today’s LinkedIn, the resume is full of information as it should be.
This resume tells others who you are, what you want to be, what achievements, honors, and experiences you have, and what services you can provide. Sometimes, even a professional profile picture is enough for human resources managers of different organizations and companies to invite you for a job interview.
8. Brand Awareness
With an optimized profile, you can have a more cohesive and strong network of connections. Higher brand awareness is normal because you can increase this awareness about your brand by producing valuable content for your target audience.
Engage with your audience, especially those who comment or react to your posts, and drive them down the sales funnel. Brand awareness is one condition for increasing sales in marketing.
Killer LinkedIn Profile Examples
There are thousands of killer profiles; if you search them, you can see and be inspired. I thought, why not bring some of them here as examples? Let’s take a look:
1. Lalaina Rabary
This one is a live sample of all those tips on how to optimize your profile. It has a perfect photo for the profile and background, no buzzwords, and a perfect summary that shouts her passion for the job she has. When you scroll down, she has a very organized skills section, experience section, and volunteer jobs.
2. String Nguyen
I mean, look at this profile. It is too good to be true. It has an amazing background, a perfect picture, and no CEO word trying to shout her position at you. You can look at the summary she has in her profile and read the outstanding text there. If that is not an attractive profile, I do not know what it is.
Conclusion
A strong profile can greatly impact your success on LinkedIn and get you closer to your activity goal on this platform. It doesn’t matter what industry you work in, from nurse and engineer to real estate consultant, marketer, human resources manager, typist, etc. Everyone needs a good LinkedIn profile.
So, it is better to learn how to optimize your LinkedIn profile. The faster you repeat this process, the faster you will see the result of this effort. ⏳
💡 Additional read: Do Nurses Need LinkedIn?
FAQs
1. How do you get the top 1% on LinkedIn?
Achieving “top 1%” status on LinkedIn usually refers to being in the top 1% of profile views among your connections or industry. Boost your visibility by consistently sharing valuable content, engaging with other posts, expanding your network, and optimizing your profile for search. Building a strong, active presence will naturally increase your profile views.
2. What is 500+ on LinkedIn?
The “500+” on a LinkedIn profile indicates a user has 500 or more connections.
3. What happens when you get 30,000 connections on LinkedIn?
You can’t add any more connections once you reach 30,000 direct connections on LinkedIn. However, people can still send connection requests to you. While you can’t increase your connections beyond this limit, you can still gather unlimited followers.
4. What happens when you get 5,000 followers on LinkedIn?
Reaching 5,000 followers on LinkedIn doesn’t result in any specific platform change or functionality. However, it does indicate a strong presence and influence on the platform. With this audience size, your content has the potential for greater reach and impact within the LinkedIn community.
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