You’ve all heard of LinkedIn, right? It’s the go-to business platform for a lot of business folks worldwide, no matter the size of the company they work in or for.
But how successful are most of them in getting what they’d hoped for – usually clients?
Not very.
As with most new ventures, it takes a lot of know-ledge to figure out the ups and downs, rights and wrongs of using LI to succeed in getting what we want out of it.
LI officially launched in 2003, and I joined in October 2005, when it was just beginning to be a sought-out venue. But there weren’t many folks using it then that I knew, so I did what I could for about 10 years, although I really didn’t know how to make the most of it.
I got lucky because a couple of wonderful folks saw my posts and showed me how to do far better than I was doing on my own.
Fast-forward to today: I know how to help others maximize their presence, find clients, learn from others, and use their time on LI to great advantage. And given that right now in 2024, there are an estimated 1 BILLION profiles on the platform, it definitely pays to understand how to make it all work. (It’s also estimated that only ¼ of that billion actually use LI, but that’s still a lot of users.)
In this series of articles, I’ll cover the sections of any LI profile, showing you exactly how to create them to help YOU stand out from the crowd and rise above the noise.
The 5 major sections of any profile are:
The banner, that space at the top that LI fills with a gray or green “nothing much” background.
The picture, which should be one of us that invites others to like us.The headline, the first few words under our picture, which should give a hint of what we do and why it matters.
The About section, which gives us room for 2600 characters, including spaces, to describe how we help others.
The Featured section, which we can use to show some of our own favorite articles that aren’t easily found.
Too many newbies skip over these, but they’re the FIRST things anyone sees. They can make or break someone’s decision to keep reading to see who we are and what we do that might help them.
Now, I know that many who are reading this think they don’t need or want LI because their company largely gets its clients only in local areas.
But, think of this: A friend of yours lives 1,000 miles away but sees something you wrote that is EXACTLY what a friend of theirs is looking for, and that person lives just 20 miles away from you!
So while LinkedIn may not be for everyone, it’s still worth exploring to see exactly how it could be for YOU. Feel free to check out my profile (https://www.linkedin.com/in/susanrooks-the-grammar-goddess/) and others, and see if anything we’ve done gives you some ideas for your own profile.
Next month’s article on LI will show you exactly how to create your banner, and show you some examples of ones I love.
