LinkedIn profiles: A best practice guide

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Best practice LinkedIn profile – Individual

LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional network with over 250 million members, growing at a pace of about two members per second. LinkedIn connects you to your trusted contacts and helps you exchange knowledge, ideas and opportunities with a broader network of professionals.

In the following guide you’ll find a wealth of best practice tips to help you optimise your individual LinkedIn profile and reap the benefits of being professionally connected to the people, insights and discussions to make you better at what you do.

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Profile picture

NameHeadline

Location and Industry

Contacts

A professional picture with a plain background is a must to add character to your LinkedIn profile. Pictures should be in JPG, GIF or PNG format, a maximum of 4MB, and between 200px square and 500px square.

First and last name (no nicknames or initials) – there is also an option to add a former or maiden name as well.

The headline section is where a lot of people lose their opportunity – LinkedIn will automatically populate this section with your latest job title, but it can be customised to a personal tagline. It is the first piece of text that viewers will see on your profile, and it follows your name in search hit lists. If your company’s brand is strong enough, the name of the company and your job title may be enough. If not, you may need to distil your professional personality into a more eye-catching phrase, or something that describes who you are at a glance.

Location and industry: keywords or phrases could be used here to describe your industry, however some people use a tagline, solutions statement or various positions. Your location could be where you are based, or if looking for work, the region you are interested in. The key here is to use high priority terms that will show up in search results.

“The importance of optimising your location: people search for professionals in specific locations.”[Source: Maximize Social Business]

“Adding a LinkedIn profile picture makes your profile 7x more likely to be viewed by others.”[Source: Maximize Social Business]

List email addresses, phone number, mailing address, Twitter accounts, websites and blogs. This can provide good SEO backlinks to a company website. Encourage your employees to maximise this potential by sharing content and links on their personal profiles.

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Ensure you’ve covered at least 3 or 4 of the following topics in your summary:

Current work – what are you currently or regularly working on?

What key problem do you solve for clients? How do you solve it?

What do you most like about working for your company?

What industries/sectors do you specialise in?

Where do you see yourself in 12 months?

Client testimonials – include them if you have any.

Have examples of your work? Upload them via the buttons!

Evidence of performance results.

The SummaryThis is the most important part of your profile. You want to draw the reader in and give them an insight into your character, so this section should be written in first person narrative.

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ExperienceIn date order, include work history. Each role should include:

Title: what did you do?

Company

Date of employment (Month/Year to Month/Year)

Location

Description of company (2 lines max).

Description of your role: what did you achieve? What did you do on a day-to-day basis?

If you have a link to an example of your work, add this here.

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Courses

Projects

Skills & Expertise

Include any relevant qualifications/courses/training in support of your profile, and if applicable the type of work you are seeking.

Include relevant information about any projects you have been involved in to add depth to your profile.

What skills do you have to offer? What are your areas of expertise gained from current and past employment? List them here and your connections will start to endorse you!

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Education

Additional Info

In date order, include relevant qualifications/degrees. Each educational institution should include:

• Nameofinstitution

• Coursetitle

• Qualificationobtained

• Dateofstudy(Month/YeartoMonth/Year)

• Location

It’s great to add a bit of colour to your profile by defining your personality and interests. It will give new entrants to your company (and indeed, recruiters) an idea of who you are.

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Best practice LinkedIn profile – Company

Creating a LinkedIn company page gives more visibility and exposure to your brand, products and services.

It is important not to overlook the importance and relevance of the company page in relation to your target audience and your brand persona.

“47% of B2B businesses use LinkedIn”[Source: Spectrum Group Online]

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Company Logo Static Banner

Company Name

PNG, JPG or GIF format, maximum size of 2MB – will be resized to 100x60px.

The Home Page will be the page that viewers land on when searching for your company. It needs to give a clear overview of your company and its ethos, creating a good impression. Once you begin to populate your company page, this tab will show ‘Recent Updates’, (job postings and recent hires), it’s an outlet to let your community know what is current in your company.

PNG, JPG or GIF format, maximum size of 2MB – at least 646x220px (you can crop your image once it has been uploaded). Pick an image that represents your company or brand well, as this is usually the first thing viewers will see when visiting your page.

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This communicates your company’s important messages to your audience. Use content that links back to your website to help generate leads and page authority. Once you’ve posted an update, don’t leave it there: keep the conversation going by liking and commenting on updates and responding to other users, subsequently engaging with your audience.

By upgrading to a business account, your company can benefit from geo-targeted updates, meaning that you can direct your updates towards pre-determined locations, companies and employees by job title. If you want to get even more in-depth, you can also add filters such as school, skills, groups belonged to, gender and age.

The ‘Recent Updates’ feed

“50% of company followers are more likely to purchase products and services from a business they engage with on LinkedIn.”[Source: Social Media Examiner]

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This section of your company profile lets your community know what drives your company, and why it is so special. Consider these questions when writing this section:

• Whyshouldsomeonebeinterestedinyourcompany?

• Whenwasitfoundedanybywhom?

• Whathasyourcompanyaccomplishedsinceitfirstbegan?

• Whatareasdoyourcompanyspecialisein?

Include the following pieces of information in this section:

• Companysize

• Companytype

• WebsiteURL

• Industry

• Operatingstatus

• Yearfounded

• Locations

About Us

Using the correct keywords will help your company to appear in search results.

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This is optional, but if you are a larger company continually looking for staff, you’ll want to help your audience understand your company’s culture and available career opportunities.

In this section, you can showcase awards, map out career paths, highlight your best employees, and post jobs that target the right candidates using automated job matching.

Again, be sure to pick content and a banner image that links back to your website – PNG, JPG or GIF format (static image only), maximum size of 2MB – at least 646x220px (you can crop your image once it has been uploaded). Be relevant and inspiring in order to capture the attention of a good calibre of employee!

The Careers page“41% of LinkedIn users rate it for its face-to-face networking effectiveness.”[Source: Forbes]

“75% of LinkedIn members use it to research people and companies.”[Source: Forbes]

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Updates This section shows the popularity of your most recent posts on your company page. For each post in the table, you’ll be able to find out how many times your content was shown to a LinkedIn member (‘Impressions’), and how many times they clicked on your content, company name or logo (not including likes, comments or shares – these are reflected in the ‘Interactions’ column). ‘Followers Acquired’ is fairly self-explanatory, whilst ‘Engagement’ shows the number of interactions plus clicks and followers acquired, divided by the number of impressions.

Reach This graph shows the number of times your company updates have been seen both organically and via sponsored (paid) search on a daily basis. This information can be cross-referenced by either ‘Impressions’ or ‘Uniques’ (new click-throughs), and the date range can be varied by selecting the drop-down list on the right of this section. Companies can utilise this information to help them determine the best search methods to use in order to make their content visible to their target audience.

Engagement How many times members clicked, liked, commented on, and shared your company content in both organic and paid campaigns, as well as the number of followers acquired through paid campaigns.

Followers The followers section shows the overall number of members following your company page, and breaks them down into five types of demographic data, such as ‘Seniority’ and ‘Industry’. If you have followers who have been acquired via both organic and paid search, you will also see the top five places your followers are being referred from in this section. The ‘Trends’ area shows how your number of followers have changed over time, allowing you to see if a particular update or piece of content has had an effect on the number of followers gained or lost. Finally, the ‘How You Compare’ section allows you to view the number of followers you have in comparison to those following similar companies, and perhaps allow you the opportunity to rethink your content plan.

The analytics tab is a great resource allowing companies to glean information about their most popular posts and content via handy page metrics and trends.

Analytics“45% of members use LinkedIn to build new relationships with people who may influence potential customers.”[Source: Forbes]

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About Ledger Bennett DGA

We are a B2B Demand Generation agency that uses sales and marketing know-how to help customers increase revenue by deploying Inbound Marketing, Content Marketing and Marketing Automation strategies. Our highly focused Demand Generation programmes drive our customers’ business performance, helping them to:

n Generate more opportunity

n Convert that opportunity into sales

n Retain customers and grow their value

Using more measurable and cost effective techniques than traditional full service marketing agencies we are able to maximise business revenue in the modern world where the internet has fundamentally changed the behaviour of the buyer.

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