Setting up a LinkedIn Professional Profile

LinkedIn focuses on professional networking, generating warm leads, and seeking and making business recommendations and referrals. While other social networks are geared more toward the “social” or personal side of life, including making friends and playing games, LinkedIn tends to zero in on business interactions such as accessing job listings, creating business opportunities, and marketing yourself or your company.

Individuals can set up personal accounts, called Profiles, and join or host LinkedIn Groups. Your individual LinkedIn Profile is your online professional calling card. If you have a LinkedIn Profile, you can set up a Company Page and host a LinkedIn Group on behalf of your company.

Filling out your LinkedIn profile may take longer than other social networks because it follows the format of a traditional resume. The more details you provide in your profile, the more effective it becomes. Having your actual resume on hand can speed up the profile sign up and editing process.

Your LinkedIn First Impression

LinkedIn profiles start with an introduction section that consists of these basic elements:

  • Name – LinkedIn specifies that you must use your legal name.
  • Profile photo – LinkedIn recommends your photo be at least 400x400 pixels and explains that profiles with photos get more clicks and connections than those without.
  • Background photo – The recommended dimensions for the background image are 1584 pixels wide by 396 pixels tall and less than 8MB in size.
  • Headline – This appears below your name and in search results and can be separate from the title of your current position. Use it to highlight a specific expertise.
  • Current position – This is automatically populated based on what you’ve entered in the Experience section.
  • Education – While you can add all your past education, sticking with post high school degrees is most common.
  • Location – LinkedIn shows your geographic region, not always a specific city.
  • Contact info – You can include your email address, website, instant messenger and social media accounts, birth date. You can also customize the URL for your LinkedIn profile such as: http://www.linkedin.com/in/yourname.

As you fill in your LinkedIn profile, you can see a graph with the percentage of completion as a guide. Once your introduction section is filled out, you can add more sections to your profile.

Other sections your LinkedIn profile include:

  • Summary – This statement can include your professional mission, motivation, and skills.
  • About – This is your bio or a narrative of who you are and what you do.
  • Featured – Add links to videos, your online portfolio, presentations, and other assets to market your skills and abilities.
  • Experience – This is your work history.
  • Industry – This is populated from the Experience section.

Additional LinkedIn Sections

The more details you include on your LinkedIn Profile, the more compelling your profile becomes to prospective Connections. Over the years, LinkedIn has added more sections you can use including:

Recommendations

Licenses & Certifications

Volunteer Experience

Publications

Honors and Awards

Languages

Organizations

Causes

LinkedIn lets you upload multimedia files to your Profile including PowerPoint presentations, Word documents, and PDF files, as well as embedding videos housed on YouTube. Adding sections and creative content to your profile helps to set you apart from others in your industry.

Networking on LinkedIn

After setting up your account, you can reach out to people you know on LinkedIn. If they accept your invitation to connect, you can message them directly. To contact someone who is not in your direct network, you’ll need a Premium Subscription to use LinkedIn’s InMail feature.

The main ways to network on LinkedIn are through:

  • Connections: These are the people you actually know or have met. Connections can introduce you to their contacts when you make a request. When you first sign up for LinkedIn, you can sync your email address book and add people you know to get you started.
  • Recommendations: Recommending someone else is a great way to strengthen your relationship with them. To enhance your LinkedIn profile, you can ask others for recommendations if they’ve worked with you in the past including clients, vendors, and colleagues.
  • Endorsements: When you add skills to your profile, your 1st-degree Connections can then validate them for you. When you visit a Connection’s profile, you can endorse them for their skills. This is a quick way to give kudos to someone else.
  • LinkedIn Groups: Join or start a Group on LinkedIn to communicate with other professionals on specific business-related topics.

If you have a Company Page, you can list your company’s job openings. You can also advertise open jobs throughout the LinkedIn network. Like Facebook or Twitter, LinkedIn provides a self-serve ad platform.

Publishing on LinkedIn

There are a number of ways to publish content on LinkedIn. You can post updates to your profile, similar to Facebook posts, that you can opt to post publicly, only to your Connections, or to a specific LinkedIn Group you host or have joined. To better manage your updates, use a third-party tool such as Buffer or Sprout Social to schedule messages that will post to your LinkedIn profile on specific days and times.

LinkedIn offers a blogging feature, called Articles, where you can publish short or long form content, using text, images, and video. Your Connections can be a built-in audience for your LinkedIn blog posts. As common with most blog posts, others can comment on what you’ve published as well as like and share your content on their own LinkedIn feeds.

LinkedIn offers a 30-day trial of their premium account levels, or you can opt for the free version with limited features. Once you set up your personal LinkedIn account, you can create a presence for your business with a free Company Page.

LinkedIn is not only a powerful network for individuals but an ideal place for B2B marketing to connect with companies, business owners, and other professionals.