Getty
With membership approaching one billion, LinkedIn is your most powerful career development asset when you use it correctly. Yet many people tell me that they find LinkedIn overwhelming or a time drain or confusing. In this article, I’ll share my secrets for making LinkedIn work for you (not the other way around) so you can spend less time on the platform and achieve better results for your career.
There are three career development areas where LinkedIn provides an unparalleled service:
1. Being found
There are opportunities out there that you’re completely unaware of. When you optimize your profile to exude your unique personal brand, you can be found by the people who need to know you—reporters looking for quotes for their stories, business partners who are looking for exactly what you have to offer, skilled professionals who want to come work on your team.
They key is to make keywords prominent in your profile. First, know the relevant keywords for the role you have and the one you seek next. Then, make sure your profile is replete with those keywords. And pay special attention to your headline. It’s believed to be an important ingredient in how the LinkedIn search algorithm displays results. This is the secret to creating planned serendipity. You have no idea what inspiring, fulfilling opportunities may be out there, but you can make yourself a magnet to attract them.
2. Making a magical first impression
Thanks to the fact that all things career-related have gone digital, your first impression has moved online too. When people want to learn about you in a professional capacity, they’ll go straight to LinkedIn or they’ll google you. Even if they start with Google, they’ll end up at your LinkedIn profile because it will likely show up at the top of the search. This is great news for two reasons. First, it means if you focus some effort on just one tool—your LinkedIn profile—you can create a powerful first impression that reaches a broad audience. And second, the format LinkedIn created for your profile is ideal for showing the world your authentic, differentiated and compelling personal brand.
Since your profile is being used to evaluate you, you want to craft it so it delivers a highly effective first impression, one that’s consistent with how people connect with you in the real world. The four most important elements are your Headshot, Headline, Summary and Skills.
Headshot. Your headshot makes you real in the virtual world. Invest in a professional headshot and crop your image so that 60-80% of the frame is your face. And don't forget to smile. It’s the universal welcome message.
Headline. Your headline helps communicate relevance. It should tell people what you do, for whom and how you do it. It needs to be more interesting than just a job title. Advertising execs spend 80% of their time writing and ad’s headline and only 20% on the rest of the copy because they know how important that pithy phrase is for grabbing the reader.
Summary. Your summary (now called “About”) should be the perfect combination of humanity and expertise. It needs to prove you are accomplished while demonstrating that you are human and likable. There’s plenty of room to provide all the details about your work history in the Experience section. Use your summary to entice people to want to get to know you.
Skills. Your LinkedIn profile shows viewers the top three skills for which you were endorsed. When someone is checking out your profile, those skills should reflect the three things you’re best at. And make sure those skills sit at the intersection of authenticity (you really do possess them) and aspiration (indicating that you’re ready for what’s next.).
Keep these elements up-to-date so that your first impression is always fresh.
3. Staying informed
We all know that the world has sped up. Staying on top of what’s happening is both essential and challenging in this new workplace. LinkedIn recognized this and added many features to help you stay on top of what’s happening so you can keep the saw sharp and continue to innovate.
If you check in with your feed every day, you’ll likely find some valuable content that can help you do your job better, or it can become fodder for the upcoming meeting you have. The challenge is that there’s so much content (according to Omnicore, a million users have published an article on LinkedIn), it becomes a full-time job trying to find the content that’s right for you. To sort through the clutter and get to what’s important, do this:
- Sort by most recent on top. This will get you the latest content, so if you engage regularly, you won’t miss anything, and you won’t see the same content over and over.
- Select the right hashtags to follow. Be clear about the kind of content you want to see and make sure those are the hashtags on your radar (and in your profile).
- Unclog your feed. Your feed includes all the content and updates that your connections share. Some of that is valuable to you. But some of it isn’t. And you may have some connections who seem to post new content to LinkedIn every hour. To eliminate the content that isn’t worth your while, you can unfollow certain connections. When you do this, you remain connected, but your feed won’t be clogged with their posts. And don’t worry, LinkedIn won’t tell them that you unfollowed them—that can be a secret between you and me.
When you focus on these critical benefits and techniques, you can maximize LinkedIn while minimizing the energy you spend on it.
William Arruda is the cofounder of CareerBlast and creator of the complete LinkedIn quiz that helps you evaluate your LinkedIn profile and networking strategy.
