This is the sequel to Leveraging LinkedIn to Land a Job–Job: Part 1 of 2 and was originally published for Social Media Week – New York 2012 on December 19, 2011.
Let’s bring it all together and take a closer look at my favorite LinkedIn Boot Camp infographic (unleash your inner tech-geek!). I hope you’ll find a few hidden gems of insight in this follow-up companion piece.
● Point #4 – Muscle Toning: Spice Up Your Image – I couldn’t agree more with this point. Your profile should be direct about who you are, what you’re about, and how you can help out others with your expertise, but it also needs to exude some personality. While LinkedIn is championed constantly as the professional networking site, too often people shy away from injecting their own personal flavor into their profile. Think about this from a future client or employer’s perspective: Would you really want to hire an employee that comes across bland or uninteresting? I think not.
● Point #5 – Hand-to-Hand Combat: Recommend Others – In college when I first started evangelizing the site, I was all about asking for recommendations; it’s one of the prerequisites to a “100% complete” LinkedIn profile. These days, I see recommendations as a “nice to have” but not imperative component of your profile. Save the asking for recommendations until you’ve cleared the other hurdles listed here.
● Point #6 – Heavy Lifting: Join Groups – Once you’ve hit those most important items, joining groups is key in staying actively engaged beyond passive management and updating of your profile. Joining groups will put you in touch with professionals in your field and will help you build your reputation as a thought-leader. Use groups to grow your organic sphere of influence.
● Point #7 – Self Awareness: Add Your Company Profile – A very easy-to-do, however largely forgotten, art-form on the site. Linking to your company profile not only gives your business some nice promotion, but more imperatively, augments your portfolio with more meaty substance as you link to a (hopefully) credible business that has (ideally) a similarly robust and frequently-updated LinkedIn company profile page.
● Point #8 – Target Practice: Optimize Your Search Rankings – Like many SEO best practices, this exercise involves a bit of messy, educated guesswork and is difficult to drill down to a science. That said, looking to optimize your search rankings with a nifty-sounding, keyword-heavy (though no black–hat SEO practices, please…that will directly violate Point #4, above) headline, as well as with current work experience, past work experience, summary and specialties makes total sense.
● Point #9 – Special Weapons: Add Applications – Similar to the recommendations section, the applications are nice bells-and-whistles to enhance your profile once all of the “heavy lifting” is done. Nevertheless, many of the LinkedIn applications available are terrific ways to promote your work and improve visitor experience when checking out your profile.
I’ll close with this piece as I did with my first post, which is to say: I hope that this was helpful to all of you savvy, social networkers out there. Here’s to heading over to LinkedIn and optimizing all of the resources available to you!
Related articles
● How to Find New Clients via LinkedIn (xemion.com)
● Is your LinkedIn profile in synch with your CV? (mysocialadventures.wordpress.com)
● What does your LinkedIn Profile say about you? (career-ology.com)
● Boost Your Business with Your LinkedIn Profile (themogulmom.com)
● Create a LinkedIn Personalized Public Profile URL (writingtomarketing.wordpress.com)
● 48 hours from LinkedIn profile to interview (tuesdaytribe.wordpress.com)
● 6 Best Practices Using LinkedIn For Your Job Search (messengerassociates.wordpress.com)
● LinkedIn Adds the Ability to Follow Companies (hubspot.com)
● LinkedIn Hits 100 Million Members [Infographic] (hubspot.com)
