LinkedIn is the largest professional network in the world, created with the aim of connecting professionals to create valuable relationships and improve their business, achieving visibility and success. But to achieve concrete results on LinkedIn, you need to optimize your profile.
In this article, we explain in a few steps how to optimize a LinkedIn profile to make it truly effective.
Why create a LinkedIn profile and how to get noticed
Today being on LinkedIn is a must. Not only for those who want to find new business opportunities and for those looking for new potential customers, but also for those who want to increase their notoriety and those who intend to concretely support their professional reputation.
But having a profile on LinkedIn is not enough to get noticed . On LinkedIn you don’t even need to present yourself in the best possible way if you don’t carry out any activity and simply wait, motionless, for someone to notice you.
To be successful on LinkedIn you need to optimize your profile and be active users in publishing content and interacting with your network of connections.
LinkedIn tends to reward those who are well positioned , active and proactive, that is, those who publish valuable content within the platform and interact with other users of the network and in general promote valuable content that generates quality conversations .
On LinkedIn, therefore, you need to work daily with commitment and consistency to be able to emerge “among the crowd” and be perceived as professionals in a specific sector. And for this it is essential:
- define your positioning clearly and precisely
- communicate what your skills and strengths are (and why your target should choose you)
- carve out your own market niche
What does it mean to optimize a LinkedIn profile? And, above all, how is it done?
Optimizing a LinkedIn profile means making it effective , as well as correct in information and complete in all sections (photo and background image, summary, summary, work experience, skills , interests).
LinkedIn rewards and considers well-positioned a profile that, among other things, reaches the highest level of completeness .
Below, let’s see how to make a LinkedIn profile complete and optimized. Read this article to learn more about how LinkedIn works and find out what you can do with LinkedIn .
Your profile photo and cover photo
The profile photo and cover photo are the first things you notice when you search and consult a profile. This is why it is essential that they immediately make a good impression.
The profile photo on LinkedIn must be of good quality and must give an idea of professionalism and authenticity (so no holiday photos or portraits in fun contexts, if we care about our reputation!).
The cover (or background) image helps to communicate the image you want to give of yourself or your company, which is why it is good that it recalls the work context or that it is linked to your business. We wrote an article on how to customize your profile background image .
But also pay attention to the dimensions: it is not uncommon, in fact, to find cropped or decentralized images, which are poorly suited to LinkedIn formats. Read this article to find out all the dimensions of LinkedIn .
Summary and Summary: Your Business Card
The summary (or headline) is that 220 character text found under the name and surname in your LinkedIn profile. Often underestimated, the summary actually has great potential and a very important strategic role because:
- it is the text that we “carry with us” everywhere on LinkedIn, as it is seen by those who read our updates on the homepage, or by those who find us via the search engine;
- it must make our interlocutors immediately understand what we really do.
In most cases, however, it is mistakenly reduced to a mere description of one’s company qualification. Read this article to know what to write in the summary and how to make it effective .
The summary , on the other hand, is the description found immediately after the Summary and is the first text that is read after opening a user’s LinkedIn profile (recently LinkedIn shows it with the title “Information”)
From a content point of view, the summary represents the gateway to discovering our professional profile, which is why it is essential that it is carefully written and that it manages to capture the interlocutor’s attention immediately. For more insights on how to write an effective summary, read this article .
Work experience, training and skills
Another aspect not to be underestimated when you want to optimize your LinkedIn profile is filling out the Experience and Training section .
Very often these parts of the profile are filled out hastily, without giving the right importance and weight to information that could instead prove indispensable for describing one’s current way of working. And who could therefore give added value to their professionalism.
This is why it is always recommended to briefly but effectively describe your job role, highlighting your skills and goals achieved over the years. It is also good practice to add company documents and presentations that show specific aspects of your work or important projects you have worked on.
Ditto for the Education section: it is not enough to simply mention the school or university attended. It is appropriate to indicate what the main topics/subjects of study were and any specialization courses that were followed even after university.
Finally, the Skills : it is a good idea to accurately define the skills that distinguish us and that we want to communicate. It is possible to choose 3 main skills, useful for defining your positioning as experts in a specific sector, and then add further “sector knowledge” or other types of skills (e.g. interpersonal) to enrich your background. Obviously the choice of specific skills must be in line with your job role and experience.
To learn how skills work on LinkedIn, read this article .
Let’s remember that the more a profile is full of information and interesting content, the more successful it will be.
Read this article to find out what are the most common (and penalizing) mistakes not to make on LinkedIn , to do your business better and obtain good results.
The role of keywords in optimizing your LinkedIn profile
On LinkedIn, a self-respecting profile cannot, however, be “only” complete with all the required information. It must also (and above all) be effective.
To make your profile optimized, you need to work on the content and know how to choose the right keywords to describe your role and your know-how in a precise and targeted way.
The choice of keywords not only allows you to clearly identify a user’s sector of specialization and skills. But it also plays a very important role in terms of positioning in the LinkedIn search engine: this is what is called LinkedIn SEO .
In fact, LinkedIn, in addition to being a social network, is a search engine so it is very important to appear among the top in the rankings. One of the first things to think about when creating your personal profile is identifying the keywords you want to rank for.
The keywords often coincide with one’s skills and work experience, as well as with the services that can be offered to one’s target. Therefore it is useful to identify 3 or 4 recurring keywords on which to build your story-telling.
Once you have identified the keywords useful for your positioning, it is important to insert them strategically within all sections of your profile . That is, in the Summary and Summary, in the Experience, Training, Skills and confirmations sections.
The value of content and interactions to improve your LinkedIn profile
LinkedIn is a relationship social network and rewards users who interact and publish valuable content .
Interactions are the fundamental point for generating new contacts so we cannot leave this aspect to chance. We must ensure that each of our interactions brings value and not negative feelings: we propose something new rather than criticize, we talk about encouraging experiences rather than complaining, we give a compliment rather than clashing with those who have opinions different from ours.
Contents are relationship and reputation activators , essential for generating engagement and arousing the interest ( and interaction) of the public.
Those who consistently publish “valuable content” on LinkedIn obtain more visibility, have a greater chance of getting noticed and work, indirectly, on building their personal branding.
By valuable content we mean all those topics that can provide added value and are in some way useful to your audience. Think for example of:
- educational content (“practical guide to….”)
- posts that talk about a specific know-how (“how to….”)
- narration of significant experiences for one’s role or sector (e.g. events, training, travel, etc.)
- reflections that express one’s own point of view on a specific topic of general interest
Remember that regularly publishing posts on LinkedIn is also useful for being able to position yourself better in the minds of your target and carve out your own niche in which to stand out and make a difference. For more insights on how to write effective posts on LinkedIn, read this article .
Now it’s up to you! If you want to be successful on LinkedIn, improve and optimize your profile, get to work now.
- Update all sections of your personal profile
- Choose 3 or 4 keywords useful for your positioning
- Rewrite the summary and summary, highlighting your strengths
- Define the skills that really describe you
- Establish an editorial plan and publish valuable content
And your LinkedIn profile will get noticed, we bet?
