Does your brand have a LinkedIn profile? More often than not, the answer is no. In fact, a lot of brands are missing the boat by not having a LinkedIn company page. Whether you’re a small brand or a large business (heck – even bloggers!) a LinkedIn page can be a huge benefit to your awareness. A LinkedIn company page can serve a variety of functions, in addition to your personal profile. There really are a lot of benefits when it comes to having a LinkedIn page for your brand.
Having a LinkedIn profile for your brand showcases your company and can act as an indirect ambassador. You can also measure the efficacy of your updates and get alerts whenever someone mentions your company. Best of all, you can promote your own information/content and showcase some of your services. One of the easiest ways to start building your brand online is to optimize your LinkedIn profile. This will make it easier for your brand to be found AND remembered. No matter the size of your brand, or if you’re even a freelancer, you can truly benefit from having a fully optimized LinkedIn profile.
It’s simple, really. In order to create a company page, you need an email address from your business. Like, yourname@yourbrand.com Thankfully, you can then choose a selection of admins to help manage the page. However, they must be connected with you on LinkedIn. Your admins will have full access to your page and have the power to add or remove other page admins.
How and why brands benefit from LinkedIn is pretty simple. LinkedIn really has become a great source for brands to publish, share, and reach their target audience. Even though the platform is considered to be the social site for professionals to connect, more and more brands are taking advantage of its solid reputation to circulate content to clients.
According to a report by LinkedIn, the site has 30 million users in more than 200 countries. This expansive reach can make your brand’s content visible to customers both near and far. This makes it a highly effective outlet to get in front of your audience in a truly credible way.
How your brand benefits will depend on how properly you clarify the following:
1. What do you want to be found for? If you create your profile just because somebody told you to, you should probably rethink your decision. In order to succeed on LinkedIn, you need to have a clearly defined goal. LinkedIn optimizations is NOT a one-time activity. It’s a commitment to both yourself and your brand.
Optimizing means that you need to create your profile and then make adjustments based on your goals. Test what works and what doesn’t and consistently tweak them as your business goals evolve. So before you create a profile, you really need to ask yourself, “What do I want to be found for?” The answer to this question is crucial to your success on LinkedIn.
2. How Do You Want To Be Remembered? Once someone finds you on LinkedIn and sees your profile, you’re on the right track. Even just one view can lead to some awesome opportunities. But what does this actually mean? Without profile views, you’re missing out on A LOT of opportunities. That’s why the ‘Who’s Viewed Your Profile’ feature is one of the important metrics in your LinkedIn arsenal.
Your next move is to figure out how you want to be remembered. If your profile is sadly incomplete, chock full of grammatical and spelling errors, or doesn’t say anything about what your brand really is – you’re missing the point. Your LinkedIn profile NEEDS to highlight how great your brand is and if there’s hardly anything on it no one will remember you, period.
If your profile viewers found and remembered you for an awesome reason, you’re most likely to convert that profile view into a career or business opportunity. Let’s say you want to be found on LinkedIn as a social media coordinator. Someone who can help other brands reach their goals and help them build a social media presence. To start off, you need to have a highly optimized profile so your viewers are completely convinced that you actually know what you’re doing.
Once you’ve figured out YOUR answers, it’s time to optimize your profile. Below are seven ways to build a killer LinkedIn profile that will get you noticed AND remembered.
Go ahead and take a look at your current LinkedIn profile URL. If you see a horrid collection of numbers and letters that make absolutely no sense (take a peek at the image below), it means you haven’t optimized your URL. Don’t worry, it’s a simple fix. You can edit this and get a unique URL that no one else can claim.
It’s pretty easy to change, just Select ‘Edit public profile & URL’ on the right sidebar and Click on the pencil icon to edit your profile URL.
It seriously on takes a few minutes to customize your profile URL and it does wonders when it comes to helping other people find you on LinkedIn. Most importantly, it makes your profile look A LOT more professional. Who doesn’t love that?
By default, LinkedIn uses your current or latest job experience in your headline. This doesn’t always go over well in terms of people remembering you. Thankfully you can edit your headline so it accurately reflects how you want to position yourself on LinkedIn. More often than not, your job title at your current company doesn’t clearly communicate who you are as a professional. This is why its a really good idea to edit your headline.
All you have to do is click on the pencil icon on the right side of your profile photo and edit your headline and save it.
Your headline is so important when it comes to being found on LinkedIn. Make sure that you include keywords that your target audience or potential clients would search for when they’re looking for people with your skills, products, or services.
For example, it’s not a great idea to use ‘Quality Control and Training Leader’ in your headline. Nor is it a good idea to list it in the “Experience” section. Even if it is the title you’ve been given by your current employer. Why? Because people who are looking for editors or trainers won’t think to search for ‘quality control’ or ‘training leader’ in the search box. It just won’t happen. They’ll search for ‘editor’ or ‘trainer’ instead. It also doesn’t hurt to mention your exact position in the “Experience” section. This way your colleagues won’t be confused or surprised.
You should also take the time to figure out which keywords will help you get found. And whatever you do, don’t skip this. You’d be surprised at how the right keywords will score you a TON of profile views.
One of biggest mistakes that LinkedIn users make is forgetting to write something in their profile summary. This is a crucial element to getting found and increasing the chances of landing that perfect opportunity.
Your profile summary lets you talk directly to your target audience and tells them exactly how you can help solve their problems. Whenever you do write your profile summary you need to make sure to write it with your target audience in mind. And always aim to answer the question, “What’s in it for them?”.
No matter how awesome you are, try your hardest to avoid buzzwords like ‘strategic’, ‘passionate’ etc. Instead, be very specific. Feel free to use numbers and actually show your results. You’re able to use up to 2,000 characters for your summary, which is why you should always aim to include relevant keywords wherever you can. Whenever you have a well-written profile summary chock full of clarification, it will give you a lot of opportunities to get those profile views under your belt.
There are three main advantages when it comes to managing your ‘Featured Skills & Endorsements’:
However, asking for endorsements can be somewhat of a challenge. But it is worth asking. So go ahead and ask for endorsements from people you’ve actually worked with. Chances are they’ll be more inclined to come through.
Okay, here’s the thing. LinkedIn IS NOT Facebook. It is a professional network, and if you want to build your brand, you need to create a good impression. This is where a professional headshot comes into play. If you want people to know, like, and trust you, you NEED to use a photo that shows how you look when you might attend a networking event or meeting people for the first time in a professional setting.
Therefore you need to invest in a professional headshot because it actually does matter. If you have a friend who is great at photography, ask them to take a few shots. If you don’t, go ahead and hire a professional photographer. Whatever you choose, just make sure you do it. A great, professional photo really is your first step to getting people to like and trust you.
Don’t forget to set your profile photo visibility. And remember that you can choose to be visible only to your connections, to your network (first-degree to third-degree connections), to all LinkedIn members who are signed in, or to the general public. Just keep in mind that you’ll maximize your chances of being found and contacted by the right people if you choose to go public. Ultimately, your choice should support your overall goal when it comes to using LinkedIn.
Here’s the thing. You need to make it easy for your profile viewers to INSTANTLY see what you do and HOW you do it. Therefore it’s a good idea to display your work samples as a way to demonstrate your skills and show your achievements. You could upload photos, images, videos, presentations, and other documents. You can even add links to external sites that showcase your work with a variety of rich media content providers. Sharing your work gives them more of a reason to trust you and this is always a good thing.
Whenever you customize your LinkedIn profile banner, it gives you another chance to better define your personal brand and help you stand out from the rest. Canva is a great site to use for this, since it’s an easy-to-use graphic design tool that lets you customize your profile banner. You should totally do this too. Because trust me, you won’t impress anyone with the boring, basic LinkedIn profile banner.
It definitely won’t help you stand out OR be remembered.
You can get some killer inspiration from the following LinkedIn profiles:
Hopefully, these seven steps will help you create a more professional and effective LinkedIn profile. Is there anything we shared that you are already using your LinkedIn profile? What haven’t you used? And what will you use next? Let us know in the comments below, so we can discuss!
