Over the last few weeks I have been updating the Social Media Bureau’s seminar LinkedIn for Business ready for our 2014 seminar programme. As well as noting all the changes made by LinkedIn I make a point of reading around the advice that is available across the Internet. Here’s a summary 10 point checklist for your LinkedIn personal profile that I have pulled together.
I came across an article on Forbes’ website that detailed the mistakes that LinkedIn users are making and how these can often interrupt their efforts on the platform. I’ve summarised the comments from the original post and added a few of my own.
1. Make sure your public profile has all the keywords that are important to you and your company and that you are only displaying to Google, Bing, Yahoo etc. the parts of your personal profile that are appropriate
2. Switch off the default that tells everyone that you have made changes to your profile
3. Make sure that you link to the correct company in your job profile, especially if you haven’t switched off notifications above! Here’s my blog on connecting to your companies’ profile.
4. Switch off notifications from your contacts who are constantly posting – recruiters please note this usually means you! Here’s my blog on switching off spam from your contacts.
5. Hide your connections from prying eyes
6. Allow others to see that you’ve looked at your profile
7. Switch off all those extraneous emails that you receive from LinkedIn from groups for example. You could go the extreme that I have done and switch them all off so that I know any email from LinkedIn must be malware and can safely be ignored. Here’s my blog on avoiding malware emails that claim to be from LinkedIn.
9. Auto congratulation emails for job anniversaries can’t be turned off directly but LinkedIn can be ‘conned’ into not sending them
10. Don’t exaggerate your efforts on your profile – everyone can see what you’ve written
All of these tips are fully explained in our LinkedIn course along with other practical examples on how to best to use LinkedIn for Business.
Thanks to Cheryl Conner and her post “The LinkedIn Settings Mistakes That Most People Still Make” that prompted me to post this summary.