When was the last time you updated your LinkedIn profile, is it optimised well so that people can find you? LinkedIn is changing at a pretty fast pace at the moment and is becoming a great tool to get yourself known and build lasting relationships. We thought it would be helpful to share some tips on how to make sure your profile is fully optimised and how, by spending just 10 minutes every day, you can raise your profile, get noticed and win more business.
Mark Williams, aka Mr LinkedIn, conducted some research recently on LinkedIn to find out what key areas you should focus on to improve your ranking in others searches. The main two areas he found made a real difference were:
Your profile
Your activity
We’ll go into more detail now and share some tips on some small changes that can make a big difference.
Your Profile
Think about what you do and what you offer. If someone were to find you, what key words would they need to search for. What are you known for? Try and narrow down this focus and don’t be afraid to change it from time-to-time in line with your new business activity. For example, if you are doing a proactive new business approach to the pharmaceutical sector, then change your profile to reflect this. Use your list of keywords throughout your profile: in job titles, job description, other members’ recommendations and most importantly in your profile Headline.
LinkedIn created the Profile Strength Meter to gauge how robust your profile is. Fill out as much detail as possible on your LinkedIn profile so that LinkedIn gives you a higher profile strength.
Your activity
People are complaining that LinkedIn is becoming more like Facebook with its informal status updates, however posting regularly on LinkedIn and being consistently responsive can have a positive impact on your search rankings. Commenting on people’s posts rather than just liking them helps, as well as writing articles, sharing others posts, sharing external content and posting comments.
You can also use the @mention feature to tag a person or company in your post which helps boost engagement and interaction, however use this properly, in the right way, otherwise you will simply be hacking off your connections. This other article by Mark Williams has some helpful advice on etiquette when using this feature.
How we use LinkedIn Effectively (in as little time as possible)
We get daily requests from people, relevant to my industry wanting to connect with me and the majority of the enquiries we get from people wanting to work with me come from LinkedIn. We post an article of value every week on LinkedIn – this article also goes as a blog post on our site and we post at least one comment/status update every day. These are a mix of our clients’ news, industry news, snippets from our blog posts and a few personal/opinion updates. For the last few weeks we have been planning these in advance each week using a google sheet so it means we simply have to copy and paste each day. We then spend 10 minutes, using a timer, going through LinkedIn and interacting with people’s content.
Here are some other resources that you might find helpful: