 The features on professional networking site LinkedIn change frequently, so it is worth spending some time periodically to update your profile.
Earlier this month I attended the AIIP (Association of Independent Information Professionals) annual conference. I took a bit of extra time to attend one of the pre-conference workshops put on by Scott Brown, owner of Social Information Group, on using LinkedIn. It was good to have a current, detailed look at the network and its current features.
Allow me to share a few things I learned:
- some of the formatting options are hidden under unrelated sections in the Edit Profile view.
- add additional keywords under "Interests" that you believe people looking for you will be likely to search for. You can edit Interests by clicking "edit" for your websites list.
- add descriptions to your current and past positions. You can especially add wording (key words) that might be searched by others when they are looking for people. If you write proposals or resumes, you may already have some of this wording on hand.
- include your volunteer positions, such as committee work, in your profile since these demonstrate experience and skills attained in addition to your day job.
- to format the text in your profile summary as you might have seen others do: while formatting features such as bullets are not available inside the LinkedIn system, you can copy and paste from elsewhere for a better look.
- you can add a Publications section to your profile, to which you can add any books you may have written, articles, and blog posts. You need to add these in the order you would like to see them as you will not be able to rearrange them later.
- if you are organizing an event, it is a good idea to add it to LinkedIn so that others can indicate they are attending.
- use the status message to link to items that might be of interest to your followers.
- a third party tool such as TweetDeck or HootSuite allows you to post status messages to LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and other sites, giving you control of where you send any particular message.
- including a professional profile photo is a good idea. Without it, your name in listings looks incomplete. Also it gives others a visual reminder of who you are when they view your profile, for example someone who you met only once at a meeting or conference.
An additional tip I picked up during the conference:
- to see information on who has viewed your page, you need to allow permission to view yours; you will want to change this setting back to show less about yourself.
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Hi Connie,
This is all really helpful, thanks for sharing this!
Isabelle
You are very welcome! I came away with a whole list of things to do to improve my own LinkedIn profile, and suggestions for some of my clients as well. The morning spent with Scott was very worthwhile.
Thanks for the post, Connie! I'm glad the workshop was so helpful. I find there's always something new to learn in LinkedIn, which is great!
Connie – thanks for posting this. I have a couple additional tips. It's not uncommon for folks to inadvertently create multiple LinkedIn accounts over time. On request, LinkeIn will merge multiple accounts, getting all your disparate connections and info under one account. Tip number two relates to contact info. Many folks use their work contact info in their profile. Remember that even if you choose not to make this info public, LinkedIn needs a current email address in order to notify you of connection invites. As we change jobs are email changes and I think many people are missing invitations due to out of date addresses in their profile.
Scott–thank you for stopping by! You should consider adding this workshop to the offerings on your website.
Rob–some great additional tips!
Everyone: it looks like unfortunately the "additional tip" no longer fully works. They will only show you the search results that come through after you change the settings on your account, so switching them back and forth will no longer work. Too bad!
I hide my identity and have a premium LI account @$200 / year. I just noticed that now I can see the identity of all who are looking at my profile (unless the person remains anonymous). So maybe LI decided that they didn't like people switching back and forth just to see who is looking at their profile.
I don't know if this works for free accounts & would be curious.
Ellen, one of the privileges with your premium account is to see the profiles that are made available even if you keep yourself hidden.
For the rest of us with freebie level accounts, we have to give access to our profiles.