Your LinkedIn profile is like a big-sized business card/professional bio or a resume that keeps on growing. It is a great way to connect with like-minded professionals, post your insights, and share those of others with whom you are connected.
It allows you to build a strong online presence and a professional network for career advancement, job opportunities, and entrepreneurship.
If you are not sure whether you should invest time to improve your LinkedIn profile, here are a few reasons why it is important to improve your profile.
- When looking for a job, most employers check your online presence and believe it a bit more than your resume. After all, everyone can see the information you put there, and can easily call you out if anything in there is not true.
- If you’re an entrepreneur, it is a great space to reach out to potential partners, customers, and investors, or for them to reach out to you.
- People can reach out to you in a professional space that you created solely for that purpose.
LinkedIn shows its stats here and stands out with over 830 million members worldwide. It surely is a wide network of professionals.
Without further ado, here are a few useful tips on improving your LinkedIn profile, which I’ve also used on mine.
1. Choose a good profile picture and a background image
Other than your name, this is the first thing people notice in your profile. Here is a detailed guide on how to make your LinkedIn profile photo memorable. If this looks like too much at the moment, and you simply don’t have the best photo possible. Don’t worry, choose the best picture you have at the moment, and plan to change it for a better one as soon as it becomes possible.
A background photo can be you, your business, your favorite quote, or anything that helps the audience get a better feeling about you or your brand.
2. Add a headline
Pretty straightforward piece, add your current position, or go a step further and make a very short description of what it is you do, that highlights your best feature.
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3. Add/Update your information
This is the section where you can fill in all the gaps in your education, employment, skills, and so on. However, feel free to omit info that in your opinion puts you at a disadvantage or is simply unnecessary. This is not a detailed biography. This is where you want to put all the best things you did to create the right impression on a prospective employer or a business partner.
Make sure to update your contact information, whether you’re looking for a job, and if you wish you can link your social media to your profile.
4. Description/Summary
This is where you shine! This is the space dedicated for you to describe yourself/your experience.
You can either treat it as an open letter to potential employers or more as a professional bio. In either case, make sure to talk about your skills and who you are creatively. When describing your experience, try creating an outcome of that particular part of your life, what it changed, and in what way this improved your skills. This will create a better description of your growth. Try creating an image of you, you want others to see and make them reach out.
Here you can also list your goals, and what you wish to accomplish in the future, near or distant. Don’t be shy, be confident in what you want, even if it sounds a bit out of reach at the moment.
5. Request a recommendation
We are all checking reviews before we do or buy anything these days. Ask your former supervisors or colleagues for a review. Ideally, you should have one recommendation per position, but don’t worry, even one is better. It takes time to gather everything necessary.
In conclusion
I was on the sidelines of LinkedIn myself, created it, but did not bother to build it properly. I went on this journey for you and discovered how easy this can be to improve my profile. This is how this article came to be, with the helpful advice of the AlphaGamma team. Hopefully, it will guide you to a better profile and with that more perspectives and opportunities on your journey.
Which of those tips was your favourite? Did we miss anything? Let us know in the comments below, or fill in the contact form to suggest any tips that we should list here.
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