New Year, new online you?
If you’re a consultant, professional or small business, LinkedIn is an online business networking environment you can’t afford to ignore. With more than 8M members in the UK and135M across the world and growing, LinkedIn is a vibrant online business community with fantastic potential for supporting your reputation, referrals and marketing.
For individual consultants, professionals and small businesses it is a great way of tracking old connections, raising your profile and making new connections.
LinkedIn can bring new business in and support your referrals process, warming leads and turning them into prospects. But to get the most out of LinkedIn, like any online channel, you need to apply a bit of digital elbow grease. The most important thing you need to do to get the most out of LinkedIn, is to complete your profile then make sure it represents you and your business to the best of your ability.
There are several easy and straightforward things everyone can and should do, whether they are accountants, lawyers or hairdressers, to make their profile more effective. In this short guide we’ll give you a few ‘must do’ tips to make sure your profile is power charged and ready to face the New Year.
1. Profile picture
The most important part of your profile is your picture and the short headline statement underneath. Humans always look at faces – we love them! And most of all we like smiling faces with direct eye contact. If yours isn’t your best shot, or if it’s past its sell by date you’ll need to replace it. So get yourself a professional mug shot – they’re not expensive and if you can find a good photographer you’ll have a picture you can use not only on LinkedIn but throughout your online profiles.
Make sure you get a digital file the right size for uploading (less than 4MB) and another that’s high quality for print use should you need it. If you’re feeling flush, get a few different looks done at the same time so you can refresh your profile from time to time.
2. Headline
The headline underneath your photo is more important as your picture. It should say exactly what you do, what problems you solve, what makes you valuable and what differentiates you from the competition. Instead of saying you’re a ‘marketing professional’ for example, be more specific and say what kind of marketing is your speciality, so ‘social media marketer’ or ‘content marketing’.
Your headline not only needs to make you stand out against the crowd, but it also needs to include your search terms as often as possible, given you’ve only got 120 words to play with!
3. Make sure your profile is complete
To present a polished profile the world, make sure you’ve completed your profile. This may mean you put aside a couple of hours over a couple of weeks to complete all the sections and get your recommendations back. Make sure you’ve included your recent workplaces or clients, your education (secondary school or higher education) and any professional qualifications you may have.
Ask your colleagues and clients to give you recommendations, but be sure to wait for at least a month before you return the favour; you look like you are doing swaps. Make sure you itemise your skills in a way that helps potential customers recognise problems they might have. If you work in and industry that uses a lot of technical skills or software, itemise the skills you have or the software you can use, in the same way that a translator should list all the languages they can work in.
4. Get recommendations
Recommendations matter. Prospects will look at what other people have said about you. They will want to know how recently you have worked with those recommending you. Don’t feel shy about asking for recommendations; you need them to have a strong profile.
Always customise the standard email request that LinkedIn offer you to offer a warm and personal invitation to the person you are asking for a recommendation from. Make sure you ask for our recommendation clearly and precisely; for example, state the skills you would like highlighting or particularly successful projects you would like mentioned. If you receive a recommendation you are not happy with you can ask for it to be revised and have the option of only publishing a recommendation if you are happy with it.
If you already have a number of recommendations, consider refreshing them, asking more recent clients to give testimonials and removing a few of the older ones from your profile.
