Top 10 Most Overlooked LinkedIn Profile Tips

LinkedIn profile any good? Here's how to make it great.

Thanks to Resume to Interviews for being a Silver Sponsor of The 8th Annual JobMob Guest Blogging Contest.

If you just want someone to improve your LinkedIn profile for you, use their LinkedIn service, which creates LinkedIn Business or Individual Pages from scratch, or optimizes existing pages.

While the fundamentals for creating a LinkedIn profile are not difficult, I am going to explain what I know as the top ten most overlooked LinkedIn tips for businesses and individuals.

Right now, 44.6% of new business is generated through B2B leads powered by LinkedIn, according to the recent State of Digital Marketing Report. In a few short years, LinkedIn has become the largest professional social network in the world, and is an invaluable resource for any business, or business-minded individual. It allows you to connect with colleagues and discover potential partnerships in ways never before possible, and can even be used to provide you with news and updates from your biggest competitors.

Anyone doing business in any industry today needs to use LinkedIn – and use it well.

But the only way LinkedIn helps you at all is if you utilize it effectively. After several years of revising, revamping, and optimizing LinkedIn profiles for businesses and business professionals of all backgrounds and levels, I began to notice the same mistakes my clients made prior to my hiring my services.

LinkedIn is simple enough to use, but it is such a powerful and thorough tool that there are many points which can be easily overlooked. These incredibly useful tips are not only going to make your LinkedIn profile the strongest it can possibly be, they are also going to change the way you use your LinkedIn for business.

1) Customize Your Public Profile URL

Your profile needs to be easy to share, memorable, and professional. One of the simplest ways to do all of these at once is by creating your LinkedIn vanity URL. You can create a specialized URL with your name or company name instead of the random numbers you are given simply by going here and clicking Customize your public profile URL in the “Edit your public profile” section located in your privacy settings.

2) Use Buttons Everywhere

If you have your own personal website or blog (or you have one for your business), you can add a Profile Badge that links to your public LinkedIn profile. This will grow your professional network. LinkedIn has multiple badge designs to select from, and you can configure your own here.

If you have a company, then add the Company Follow button to your business’s website to promote the company's LinkedIn presence and increase your website’s social proof. You can also implement a LinkedIn Share button on blog posts, emails, and other assets, so viewers can automatically share your company's content and extend your reach on the web.

Below is an example of how I have implemented this in the footer of Resumetointerviews.com:

3) Show Your Work

LinkedIn allows you to add videos, images, documents, links, and presentations to the Summary, Education, and Experience sections. You can show off your best material and give readers a sense of the quality they should expect from your and your business.

In this example below I have attached a YouTube video commercial for my service.

4) Customize Entire Sections

LinkedIn allows you to tailor your profile so people see the most important details at the top.

When editing your profile, hover over the double-sided arrow by the Edit link in every section. From here, you can drag and drop each section to another position. This can be used to customize your profile just as you did your resume. If your education was many years ago, move it down. If you want people to see that massive project, move it up.

5) Let Yourself Be Seen

Unlike online dating, checking someone's profile in LinkedIn a few times is a good thing, and it will pique their interest. Make sure other people can see who you are when you view their profile.

From your settings, click Select what others see when you've viewed their profile. Check off Your name and headline (Recommended).

As a note, this will also let your competitors know when you're spying on them for information, so be careful.

6) Check Out Who's Checking You Out

Using the “Who Viewed Your Profile” feature, you can see exactly that, and look at which users have been looking at your profile. This makes connections easier and faster, giving you an automatic in every time someone you're interested in looks at your profile.

As a note, you need to have the “Let Yourself Be Seen” option from above active in order to use this feature.

7) Work In Groups

Groups are your best friend when it comes to using LinkedIn. The more groups you are a part of, the more messaging and profile viewership you have the chance to do. When you're in a group with someone you want to message, you no longer need to be a first-degree connection in order to message them.

Group members are also able to view other members' profiles without needing to be connected. This also works in reverse – others searching for people or businesses with your skillset will be able to find you too.

8) Advanced Search

Change up your search technique to find new connections. For example, searching for a specific company like Nike and then sorting by “Relationship” will bring up any first- or second-degree connections you have to any Nike employees.

9) Contact Information is Key

Do you have multiple email addresses for your business? What about old emails addresses you have not used in a long time?

Add as many email addresses as you can because everyone you have ever known will be able to find you, although often times LinkedIn helps them do this automatically.

10) Attract Recommendations and Endorsements

LinkedIn makes it incredibly easy for others to endorse your skills, but this has little benefit to you and should not be a part of your focus. What are most important are recommendations. Besides the social proof they add to your profile, they also help you rank much higher on LinkedIn. This makes sense considering how much more time-intensive and difficult they are to obtain.

Recommendations:

Endorsements:

Want help?

If all of this is complicated, or if you're not confident in your profile, or if you're just wondering what other important points you may have missed, use the Resume to Interviews LinkedIn service, which creates LinkedIn Business or Individual Pages from scratch, or optimizes existing pages.

This allows you to better network with key decision makers, increases leads, and improves your visibility on LinkedIn and in Google search results.

About Resume to Interviews

Jason B. founded Resume to Interviews and has created thousands of resumes, CVs, cover letters, personal statements, and LinkedIn profiles for domestic and international clients in over 50+ industries since 2007. A collaborative LinkedIn profile creation process found nowhere else, RTI builds each LinkedIn profile from scratch to highlight all of your unique accomplishments, helping you present your best self when connecting with business leaders and their businesses. Read more about the Resume to Interviews LinkedIn packages here.

Subscribe to JobMob via RSS or email and follow Jacob Share on Twitter for more great job search services.