Since 2006 LinkedIn has become a prominent online professional network, with over 722 million members using the site to the present day. Ensuring you stand out amongst the crowd is essential, and as we face a second lockdown, why not spend this period of time marketing yourself?
It’s a chance to show off all that you have to offer to prospective businesses and an opportunity to secure some fantastic new networks!
Let’s start with the basic necessities. As LinkedIn is a place where you want to introduce yourself, you need a good quality, professional profile picture. Essentially you are putting a face to the name, the content on your page and all of your accomplishments. In order to be taken seriously, you want the first impression to be a good one.
Now it’s time for a strong background image. You want your background image to make your profile stand out but not distract. Let your background demonstrate your personality, working as a feature that is there to make the content on your page shine.
Your LinkedIn summary is where you want to illustrate your career journey. You want to give the viewer a sense of who you are and your experiences. Taking the time to personalise your summary enables you to give a real sense of who you truly are, your work ethos, and your aspirations. Rather than simply listing job titles and skills, relate them to your personal endeavours and how they are crucial to building your career and network.
Listing your skills is a fast and efficient way to note all of your professional qualities that make you stand out. LinkedIn provides a whole selection of potential skills that you can browse through and add to your profile.
The trick here is to not get too carried away with selecting skills and make this part of your profile too long. Try to choose a strong selection that reflects who you are in the best possible way.
Once you’ve selected your skills you ideally want to get them endorsed. This provides credibility to the skills that you’ve popped onto your page. A great way to encourage endorsements is by endorsing other people on your network, mutually boosting one another’s talents!
This is offered by LinkedIn for various skills and gives you the opportunity to demonstrate the level of your success in performing it. All you have to do is take an online test on the website itself. You also remain completely in control of whether you choose to display the results of your skills assessments or not – so it’s a win/win!
A fantastic way to prove your appetite for learning is to take a LinkedIn course. LinkedIn offer a whole variety of courses and there is bound to be one that is appropriate for you. This addition to your profile demonstrates your genuine passion for acquiring knowledge relevant to your career path, outside of work hours.
Once your profile is set up and ready, it’s time to transfer your focus onto growing your network. As this is a social media platform based on networking and demonstrating your professional ability, the more relevant networks the better! A simple and effective way of doing this is by syncing your LinkedIn profile with your email address book – this allows the platform to suggest relevant contacts to you.
Once you’ve formed your basic network, you should keep on adding and connecting with people you’ve had professional conversations and meetings with by sending them LinkedIn connection requests. This way your network will stay relevant and up to date!