22 Great Tips for Enhancing Your LinkedIn Profile

Give your profile page a bit more personality, or branding, with a visually appealing background image.

LinkedIn advises users to use an image (PNG, JPG, or GIF) with a resolution of 1400x425.

Your summary should expand on what appears in your headline, highlighting your specialties, career experience, noteworthy accolades, and thought leadership.

Don’t go back and forth between the first person and third person as it’s confusing and signals a lack of attention to detail.

In summary of LinkedIn summaries: keep your ego in check, focus on the most relevant details about your career, avoid meaningless jargon, and ensure it’s easy to read.

Using the right keywords in your profile is the difference between being found and being invisible.

• Identify the words you want to be found for when people use LinkedIn search and use those keywords in your headline, summary, and profile. 
• Using the right keywords will expose you to more potential connections and opportunities.

Under your Contact Info, LinkedIn gives you the option to link to a website or blog. But by default, the text that shows in your profile is the extremely dull “Blog” or “Website.” Anyone visiting your profile has no clue where they’ll end up if they click on that.

Want to use your actual brand or business name? You can: When editing the Websites area of your profile, select the “Other” option. Now you can add your own website title and URL.

When you created your LinkedIn profile, it had some ugly combination of letters, numbers, and backslashes that had no value for your personal branding. 

If you still have this, it’s time to customize your public profile URL. LinkedIn makes it simple to keep your profile consistent with your other social profiles.

Visual content is only growing in importance.

Help your LinkedIn profile pop by adding documents, photos, videos, and presentations.

LinkedIn lets you add several sections to give your profile more visual appeal and depth. You can add sections for posts, volunteering, languages, honors and awards, patents, causes you care about, and many more.

All of these sections open you up to more opportunities to make new connections.

People are going to endorse you for all sorts of skills — sometimes even skills you don’t actually have. 

LinkedIn lets you remove any irrelevant skills and endorsements. 

You should avoid “lying” about your skillset, even if it is by omission.

One of the biggest mistakes people make on LinkedIn is failing to reach out to connect with people you want to know but don’t yet. 

Building out your LinkedIn network has many benefits. You get in front of influencers. You get more endorsements. More people see your best content, share that content, and visit your website. And it’s great for personal branding.

“I’d like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn.” The default message LinkedIn provides is so dreadfully boring and impersonal.

When you invite someone to connect, make it more personal — mention where you met or a topic you discussed in a LinkedIn group, over email, or during a phone interview. This personal touch will increase the odds they’ll accept your request.

LinkedIn posts offer another way to grow your influence, gain more visibility, and acquire new followers.

• Your existing connections are notified whenever you publish. New people can discover your posts via search.
• Always think about the audience you want to reach. Highlight your expertise and interests by posting awesome content. Just make sure your posts are appropriate for the 400 million business professionals who use LinkedIn.

One way to start connecting with people you want to know is to join LinkedIn groups. 

Join discussions. Start interesting discussions. Don’t sell your product or service or promote yourself — sell your expertise! That will help build your personal brand.

LinkedIn search is your gateway to future connections. Search for people by name, company, or skills.

But you can go much deeper. LinkedIn’s advanced search helps you find people by job title, school, relationship, location, industry, current/past company, profile language, and nonprofit interests — with additional search options for Premium members.

Whenever you view someone’s profile, LinkedIn will share your name and headline. LinkedIn recommends this.

But sometimes you might want to be a bit stealthier before connecting. If this is the case, you’ll need to manage your privacy under Accounts & Settings.

Once you’ve grown your network to thousands, it can be a bit daunting to remember every single person or to stay in touch with a few important connections.

Luckily, LinkedIn makes this easy. In the Relationship section, in addition to telling you the date when you connected, LinkedIn allows you to write notes about your contact, including how you met, or set reminders to “check-in” at intervals from a day to every year.

When someone accepts your request to connect, don’t start pitching your service or product. This is a relationship killer.

Start slow. Comment on, share, or Like their posts.

LinkedIn even makes it super simple to stay in touch, telling you when contacts are celebrating work anniversaries or starting new jobs. Again, these are opportunities to Like or comment.

Because LinkedIn is a business network, it’s best to use it during business hours. Keep active, but don’t go overboard.

Try to post an update at least once a day at a minimum; aim for a maximum of three or four updates per day, as long as you’re sharing useful, relevant content.

What you say reflects on you. Never post negative comments about someone’s post or a past employer.

Instead, pause and think if there’s a way you can rethink and rewrite in a constructive way — if you can’t, just hit the delete button and go do something else to shift focus.

LinkedIn makes is super easy, providing an “Ask to be recommended” link, where you can specify what you want to be recommended for, who you want to recommend you, and write a personal message.

Pick specific people. Don’t just randomly ask all your contacts if they can recommend you. Be selective.

Remember to occasionally download your connections. After you’ve gone to all the trouble of building an amazing network, you don’t want to risk losing their contact info!

To do this, click on Connections, then Settings (the gear icon), and on the next page, under Advanced Settings, you’ll see a link to export your LinkedIn connections as a .CSV file.

Poor grammar, typos, and misspellings are a no-no.

Avoid typos at all costs.