Tips for Maximizing Your LinkedIn Profile

LinkedIn Not Working for You? Improve Your Profile in Five Easy Steps!

Getting to be a Rockstar on LinkedIn is a lot easier when you show up well and it starts with having a good profile. More people than ever are searching for jobs and qualified people on LinkedIn and getting connected to professional opportunities and you want to make sure you’re seen.

You’re already set up, but how do you make yourself stand out? Try these tips to improve your visibility and you’ll see.

1. Complete your profile. This might seem self-evident, but there are a ton of profiles on LinkedIn that don’t have a picture, don’t have experience or education listed, don’t have interests and don’t have a headline or title or much of anything at all. It’s not enough to be on the platform. You need to do something with it. Make sure all the sections are complete. Make sure your headline is a short, punchy description of you and not a long-winded description of what you do. Put your sections in order by dragging and dropping them where you’d like them to show up. If you feel overwhelmed by the task, assign yourself a section at a time until it’s done.

2. Make sure your profile picture and banner are professional. Get a headshot done, instead of taking a selfie and thinking that’s enough. A professional photographer will get a good angle and will know what will read well on social media, as well as the proper size for an imported picture. On the banner behind your profile pic, find a picture (istock.com, shutterstock.com, or company header) that’s in a landscape format and related to your profession. Upload it and use it as your banner – make sure it looks good on a desktop and a mobile device as your headshot is on the left in the desktop version and in the centre on a mobile device. Any print or other graphics might interfere as the main picture shifts.

3. Ask for endorsements. Once you’ve completed your profile, including your skills and interests, you can ask your connections to endorse you. From there, you can move your skills and interests around by clicking the edit pencil in the top right corner of the section and pinning your top skills to the head of the list. If you want to delete one, you have to ‘un-pin’ it by selecting it and then dragging and dropping another one into the section. Ideally, the skills you are most wanting to use would be the ones you’d ask for endorsements for and that you’d have pinned.

4. Get active on the platform. Choose some groups and people to follow, like, share and comment on posts you enjoy, message people with whom you’d like to connect and start finding useful articles from your profession that you can post.

5. Edit, edit, edit. When you do something different or new, or unusual, add it to your experience or change up your headline. Your professional life isn’t static, and your LinkedIn profile shouldn’t be, either. Keep it fresh, keep it relevant and get connected.

Let us know how these tips worked for you, share a comment below.

Katherine Lazaruk

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