How to Optimize LinkedIn Profile?

From the very first day of Facebook to this day that there are so many social networks, Profiles have always been kind of important in social media platforms. It is even more important to know how to optimize your LinkedIn profiles for the very nature of the platform. Let’s see how and why you need to do it.

How to make a good LinkedIn profile?

Well, we all know LinkedIn is one of the most professional social media platforms. With more than 870 million users, this social network is one of the most popular platforms and thanks to its nature, it has become a huge center for business. So you need to know how to make a good LinkedIn profile in it.

You can find anyone on this platform, job seeker, recruiter, investor, CEO, founder, mentor, etc. Well, they must somehow be separable from each other right? This is where a LinkedIn profile enters the equation.

A profile is not only your identity on LinkedIn, but it is also a way for people to find you on this social network using the keywords you have used in your profile. Many recruiters may see your profile and message you only because it is fully optimized.

Profiles are such a serious matter that when you search for any information about them, there are hundreds and maybe thousands of websites that have written about how to create a good LinkedIn profile.

Honestly, it doesn’t matter to anyone how much the content has been repeated, because your profile is like a sword that you carry in battle when you are active on LinkedIn. But you should know that the sword in your hand is double-edged. It can pave the way for you to be more successful on LinkedIn (wherever you are), or scare the people you’ve attracted away.

How to Optimize LinkedIn Profile? To optimize your LinkedIn profile, begin with a high-quality, professional-looking profile picture and an attention-grabbing headline that highlights your expertise or value proposition. Write a comprehensive summary that showcases your skills, accomplishments, and career goals, using relevant keywords to improve your visibility in search results. Thoroughly detail your work experience, emphasizing key projects and quantifiable results, and include any certifications, licenses, or educational achievements. Collect endorsements for your top skills and request recommendations from colleagues or supervisors who can speak to your abilities.

With your profile, you tell others who you are, what skills, education, and experience you have, whether you have a product to offer, etc. That is why you must make sure that you have a good and complete profile.

The point about LinkedIn profiles is that all profiles are visible to all LinkedIn members and cannot be turned private like Instagram. That’s why LinkedIn notifies you when someone sees your profile; it can be important for some people, you know in business terms.

The LinkedIn profile has many sections that you can easily manage and even rearrange them. From the title, you use to introduce your expertise or profession to your profile picture, education, job experiences, skills, awards and honors, portfolio, etc. All of them are adjustable and in turn, are important in your profile and have an impact on your success on LinkedIn.

However, as George Orwell said in Animal Farm, “All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.” The same is true for LinkedIn profiles. All sections are important but some are more important than others.

For example, the title and the keywords you use in it are the elements of your visibility and your Searchability depends on it. However, people who, for example, are seeking a network analysis specialist, do not do this with first and last names, but with keywords.

Another example would be your job experience, this section is so important that most people who enter your profile, review it. Well, does that mean we should spend less time on other parts? Not at all. As I said, all parts of your profile are important, but some sections are more effective.

For instance, it may not matter to someone where you worked, but what skills you have, or where you studied. Maybe someone wants to see your portfolio or see if you have anything published. But you should know that according to statistics average time that people spend on a single profile is no more than three minutes. That means most of them do not review your whole profile.

Well, let’s see what we need to do to optimize the profile in different sections. However, since LinkedIn profiles have so many sections, I chose to cover the more effective ones.

As the famous proverb says; The journey of a thousand miles starts with the first step, your first step in optimizing your LinkedIn profile can be choosing a good headline, but honestly, the first thing that recruiters, investors, prospects, etc. see in the search results is your profile picture, so:

1. Choose a suitable profile picture

No matter how good the rest of your profile is, your profile photo is the first thing anyone sees on the search results page, a bad photo can ruin everything. At the same time, a good photo can make you stand out from other members.

According to LinkedIn, a suitable profile picture can increase the number of your profile views up to 21 times, and this means 21 times more chances to succeed in reaching your goal on this platform. Well, it has some tips we have to discuss here.

• Good facial expressions
• Color photography
• proper face proportions
• Solid or blurred background
• Good lighting
• Professional shirt with solid color

× Bad proportions (either too close or too far away)

× Shirtless photo

× Wearing distracting accessories like a hat or big earrings

× Intense facial expression

× The focus should be on your face not anywhere else

× Using party photos

Since we are talking about the photo, I must say that you should pay attention to the background photo. Well, this picture is not as important as the profile picture, but choosing a suitable picture can tell your target audience exactly what character they are going to face.

I suggest you choose an original photo for the background that matches the headline you have chosen. For example, if you are a digital marketing specialist, use a board with social media strategies as your background picture (remember that this picture should be something special and attractive, not as if they are sitting in a classroom).

2. Headlines are way more than just a title

The headline format is not like a Bible verse that cannot be changed. No one said that you are only allowed to write what you are doing, you can leave it to your job experience. As LinkedIn Business says: Use the headline field to say a bit more about how you see your role, why you do what you do, and what makes you special. Take a look at some salespeople’s profiles, you see many of them went on and on about what they can do or did to help people reach their goals.

3. Summary

This section can be your little introduction on LinkedIn. You might say, well, if I leave this section blank, will something happen? No, you are not going to get struck by lightning, but you are depriving yourself of a golden opportunity to talk about yourself in your profile summary. It has always been strange to me that some people choose not to complete the summary section.

Anyhow, it is better not to list only the things you have done or the skills you have. Try to describe the reason why you think you are different than others, and tell the visitor why working with you is useful for them and why they should invest in you basded on your profile summary.

Get ideas from the influencers’ summary section, because this section can be the most personal part of your content marketing profile and you can be sure that it worth your time.

4. Wordplay

Well, buzzwords like “expert” “leader”, “experienced”, “passionate” etc. are used too much as keywords and using them alone will not convince your target audience that you have this feature. Instead, it’s better to play with keywords a little, for example, “As a business consultant expert, I turned a company from scratch into one of the top 100 shipping companies in the world.

5. Skills

LinkedIn has a long list of skills you can have in your profile, just need to know how to add or remove them. This can help give credibility to the claims you make in your headline and summary, especially if you relate them to your job experiences.

Another benefit is that you are providing an opportunity for your current and former colleagues and managers to endorse these abilities. You will not believe if I tell you how many recruiters use skills as keywords and how many of them go to this section first in the process of reviewing candidates’ profiles.

6. Connections

Connections network is your treasure on LinkedIn. your connections are the ones who can create countless attractive opportunities for you. Whether it’s about marketing or Skill endorsement or sending recommendations to you in your profile. So take the time to build a large network of the most worthy connections, because it worth more than you think.

7. Job experience

You are trying to succeed in your business by using LinkedIn’s features. So, it doesn’t matter whether you are a job seeker or a CEO, you should tell others where you worked, what experiences and achievements you had in those jobs, what position you held in those companies and what you did for them, etc. It should be done in the job experience section, because it is the most visited section of your profile.

8. Take a skills assessment

This test will not only help you test your skills, but at the end you will also get the LinkedIn-approved skills badge and you can add it to your profile. It may not seem like much, but this little virtual badge can have a lot more impact than someone endorsing you.

According to LinkedIn statistics, people who successfully pass these tests and receive a skill badge, have a 30% more chance to get employed in the position they applied for. The reason is that it can prove your abilities. Well, luckily you can take these tests as many times as you wish.

9. Recommendations

Well, recommendations help you build a strong profile more than you think. They are valid testimonials that show how problem-solving, skilled, and professional you were in your previous jobs.

Fortunately, LinkedIn has taken account of this issue and has provided a separate section for these recommendations, which makes it much easier to request them. I suggest you get in touch and see whose recommendation is more beneficial and valuable for you and what you want to do.

10. LinkedIn Learning

LinkedIn courses are one of the most attractive learning opportunities. Not only can you get a valid certificate for one of your skills by passing it (at a much lower cost than online training sites like Pluralsight), but you are also showing your visitors and connections that you are eager to learn.

11. Publications

one of my professors once said to try to leave even one sentence from yourself in this world. His words, like Professor Marie Curie’swhen he said “I can bring out the sun from this particle,” have always illuminated my path.

Publications section is one of the features that I always check in profiles. Interestingly, this huge opportunity is much underutilized on LinkedIn. Imagine that when you add it to your profile, you are telling people that you are a thought leader and an expert in your specific field. Since this section is rarely used, it can be very attractive to recruiters who scan your profile. So leave your mark in this world.

The mentioned sections were the most important parts that you should optimize in your profile, but what is the point of all this effort?

Optimizing LinkedIn profile benefits

Well, as I said, LinkedIn is one of the most popular social platforms where an optimized profile can change a lot of things. This platform has more than 870 million users, several people may visit your profile every day, considering. They can be new, old, or future colleagues, recruiters, potential customers, investors, etc. So having a powerful profile can have many benefits for you. For example:

1. Visuals

LinkedIn is a visual alternative for traditional resumes and it allows job seekers to add photos and videos in their profile to showcase their experiences, awards, news, articles, mentions, etc. much better.

2. Personal Brand

A strong profile shows that you value your personal brand. This means that you are so technologically knowledgeable that you know how important it is to be active on social networks.

3. Showcasing

Another benefit is that you show that you have significant achievements, experiences, skills, and education that you can share. This one thing is very useful for recruiters.

4. Right connections

We have a limited number of connections on LinkedIn, so we always recommend choosing wisely. Well, an optimized profile can attract the right people to you, who knows, they might even like your profile enough to hire you or try to have other business relationships to you. Just choose the right keyword.

5. More easily searched

With an optimized and strong profile, you will be more easily searched in your industry. People don’t pick up the lantern and look for you in the dark. If they are looking for a marketing strategy expert, they will search for that and probably hire one of the first page results. A complete profile has a much better chance of landing on the first page.

6. Job search

As much as we can say that LinkedIn can be used for various tasks, we must admit that the main task of this platform is to find a job. The job you find might be completely based on your skills according to the profile you create. Because you can get connected to the people you need to get the job you want.

7. Expand your network

A powerful profile can expand your communication network as much as possible. You just need to be a little more active, for example, participating in groups, events and lectures, workshops, etc. that are held on LinkedIn to attract people from your target community and convince them to press the connect button with a strong profile and content. You can easily build a strong, valuable, and intelligent network of connections to get miles a head to reach your goals.

8. Your resume

You may have seen me or others say in other articles that LinkedIn is no longer just a simple repository of online resumes. Well, this claim is true because this platform has other very attractive and powerful features. But as they always say, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, in today’s LinkedIn, the resume is complete and full of information as it should be.

This resume tells others who you are and what you want to be, what achievements, honors and experiences you have and what services you can provide them.

In fact, sometimes even a professional profile picture is enough for human resources managers of different organizations and companies to invite you for an interview.

9. Brand awareness

When you have an optimized profile, you can have a more cohesive and strong network of connections. So it is not strange if you have a higher brand awareness because you can increase this awareness about your brand by producing valuable content for related people. they are interested in your industry and know what you are talking about.

Engage with your audience, especially those who comment or react to your posts, and drive them down the sales funnel. Brand awareness is one of the conditions for increasing sales in the marketing world.

10. Physical limitations

Thanks to the Internet and LinkedIn, today all geographical and physical boundaries have been removed for you to find a job. You don’t need to wait for a visa to work in a foreign company, pack a bag and get on a plane, pay taxes in a foreign country, and endure the hassles of immigration.

Only a strong LinkedIn profile and a proper search are needed to find a foreign company that is hiring and send an application for employment. Of course, it’s not as easy as I say here, but the process of doing it has become incredibly easier and shorter.

There still are many other benefits to justify learning how to optimize LinkedIn profile, but these ten benefits are the top ones.

How to make your LinkedIn stand out: tactics

As we said, LinkedIn has more than 870 million users, and thousands of job applications may be sent in it daily. Well, everything is good so far, isn’t it? No, not really. Why?

Because people who are managing any company page in any industry may receive hundreds of job applications and resumes in a week, similarly, recruiters naturally check dozens or even hundreds of profiles every day to find suitable and worthy candidates. So what should we do?

You have to learn what to do to stand out in their minds. Do you remember the first part of the article? Where I was talking about how to optimize your LinkedIn profile?

There are a few things that must be done, and every website you go to will give you the same solution to stand out, but I want to teach you a few tactics that you will rarely find anywhere. They are not something strange and we are not going to read a magic spell, they are just ways that not everyone talks about them, and maybe when you hear these tactics you think “hey isn’t it what everyone does?”

1. Create a custom URL

Well, LinkedIn itself will generate an automatic URL for you, for example, “Link” but is it easy to find this URL? Maybe for some, but not for the majority of people and it is hard to memorize all those numbers and random letters. Try creating your own custom URL, without those extra symbols and numbers. You can also add a hint of your industry to it.

2. Avoid Buzzwords

They are everywhere. They are repeated so much that they are actually clichés rather than catchy words. Instead of expert, professional, and other things, explain your achievements in the headline, this way you will stand out in the mind of the reader much more easily. Because instead of telling a story, you have a repetitive story.

3. Update your profile regularly.

I have been looking for a suitable candidate for a job position on CUFinder and I have come across profiles that looked like haunted castles in many cases. you cannot even make sure whether that person is still alive or not. Usually, after a few days, that same person sends me a message for employment, but how do you hire someone who doesn’t even have time for their own online assets?

human is constantly changing these days, it is rare to find someone who has worked in a company for some years. Even in that case, his position must have changed. When someone hasn’t updated his profile since three years ago, he must have missed some important points in his/her resume.

4. Share relevant content

I already said that LinkedIn doesn’t have the everyday life vibes of Instagram. You may find it interesting, but LinkedIn users really have no interest in seeing your six-year-old son’s birthday photos, and this can actually drive you and your profile out of the minds of LinkedIn users while you are trying to shine in their minds.

Of course, this does not mean that you should give up all interesting posts, just make sure what you are posting must be related to your job and the industry you are in and that it should have a purpose.

5. Continue to make connection requests

Well, we are facing several types of restrictions in the requests and connections section. the limited number of connections, the limited number of requests, and the limit of sending messages to people without InMail are some of them. However, we all agree that connections can be the most important factor for success on LinkedIn.

You don’t know what opportunities the new connections are going to provide you. The bigger your network, the more people will unconsciously visit your profile. You may not be able to have more than one LinkedIn profile, but you can make it so popular that you won’t need another one at all.

6. Follow pages you enjoy

Well, like any other platform it’s important to follow people and pages you like, the things you follow show who you are to those who check out your profile. These pages that are displayed in the interest section may have a good impact on the decision of some people to cooperate with you.

7. Mind the keywords

Keywords are a factor that helps you to appear on the search results page of different users. So make sure to use the right keywords all over your profile. Take your time to choose the most appropriate keywords and use them more in the most important sections such as the introduction card, summary, resume, etc. However, be careful not to overdo it.

8. Longer posts and articles

It may seem ridiculous, but a post with as many characters as possible or an article can really make your LinkedIn profile stand out. Articles and posts show that you have enough knowledge about a topic and you can be considered a reliable source.

Paul Shapiro, founder of Search Wilderness has a research on this matter and says “Posts between 1900 and 2000 words perform the best. [They] gain the greatest number of post views, LinkedIn likes, LinkedIn comments, and LinkedIn shares.”

Take a look at the graph below to see what he means:

These are the things I could think of. Do you know other ways? Comment below.

Best LinkedIn profile examples

There are thousands of killer profiles out there and if you search them, you can see and inspire. I thought why not bring some of them here as examples? Let’s take a look:

1. Lalaina Rabary

This one is the live sample of all those tips on how to optimize your profile. Perfect photo for profile and background, no buzzwords, a perfect summary that is shouting her passion for the job she has and when you scroll down very organized skills, experience section, and volunteer jobs she had.

2. String Nguyen

I mean, look at this profile. It is too good to be true. Amazing background perfect picture, and no CEO word trying to shout her position at you. You can take a look at the summary she has in her profile for yourself and read the outstanding text there. If that is not an attractive profile, I do not know what is.

Conclusion

Well, having a strong profile can have a great impact on your success on LinkedIn and get you closer to your goal of activity on this platform. It really doesn’t matter what industry you work in, from nurse and engineer to real estate consultant, marketer, human resources manager, typist, etc. Everyone needs a good LinkedIn profile. So it is better to learn how to optimize your LinkedIn profile. The faster you do this and keep repeating this process, you will definitely see the result of this effort.

💡 Additional read: Do Nurses Need LinkedIn?

FAQ

How do I optimize my LinkedIn profile to attract recruiters?

To optimize your LinkedIn profile for recruiters, ensure you have a professional photo, a compelling headline detailing your expertise, and a well-written summary. List your skills, get endorsements, and maintain an updated work experience section with measurable achievements. Regularly engage with industry-relevant content and join professional groups. Turn on the “Open to Work” feature to signal availability to recruiters.

How do you get top 1% on LinkedIn?

Achieving “top 1%” status on LinkedIn usually refers to being in the top 1% of profile views among your connections or in your industry. Boost your visibility by consistently sharing valuable content, engaging with other posts, expanding your network, and optimizing your profile for search. Building a strong, active presence will naturally increase your profile views.

How do people get 500+ on LinkedIn?

The “500+” on a LinkedIn profile indicates a user has 500 or more connections. To achieve this, actively network by sending personalized connection requests to colleagues, classmates, and industry professionals. Engage with others’ content, participate in groups, and attend LinkedIn events to expand your reach and attract connection invitations.

What happens when you get 30,000 connections on LinkedIn?

Once you reach 30,000 direct connections on LinkedIn, you can’t add any more direct connections. However, people can still send connection requests to you, and you can accept them. While you can’t increase your connections beyond this limit, you can still gather an unlimited number of followers.

What happens when you get 5,000 followers on LinkedIn?

Reaching 5,000 followers on LinkedIn doesn’t result in any specific platform change or functionality. However, it does indicate a strong presence and influence on the platform. With this audience size, your content has the potential for greater reach and impact within the LinkedIn community.

Enhancing Your LinkedIn Profile with Data from the LinkedIn Database

LinkedIn is the most valuable social media platform for business. One critical factor that makes LinkedIn such a valuable tool is using data to create personalized user recommendations and communications.

The LinkedIn database stores a lot of information on its users. Using this data, you can improve your profile, business, etc., and make it more attractive to potential employers and business partners. 

How do I get 10k followers on LinkedIn?

To get 10k followers on LinkedIn, consistently share engaging, high-quality content that provides value to your target audience. Engage with comments, regularly post updates, and write articles on LinkedIn’s publishing platform. Actively participate in discussions, join groups related to your industry, and network with influencers. Hosting or joining LinkedIn Live sessions and webinars can also increase visibility and attract followers.

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