4 ways you might be messing up your LinkedIn profile

LinkedIn is an essential professional and personal branding tool. Over the past few years, it has become vital for businesses/business owners to showcase their experience and expertise on LinkedIn. But many people aren’t doing it properly! Here are 4 ways you might be messing up your LinkedIn profile.

Having an unprofessional or awkward profile picture

Your LinkedIn profile photo should make potential employers or business partners feel comfortable with you from the first sight. Any unprofessional photos, such as a selfie at last year’s summer BBQ, can instantly turn people away from your profile.

What’s worse is no picture at all! Make sure to take a simplistic and professional looking picture and use it as your profile image, because ‘throwback’ images are definitely not welcome!

You have no recommendations

There’s nothing more suspicious for a potential customer/business partner than to come to your profile and notice that there aren’t any recommendations. If nobody can professionally vouch for you, who’s to believe you?

LinkedIn has now made it easy to leave recommendations, so request a quick, concise recommendation from a customer/client after completing work for them or a project and you can see them accumulate. As they say, the more the better!

You aren’t engaging

The old cliché goes: People do business with people. Therefore, business should be about being social and it’s not a good choice to keep silent and to yourself, online or offline. LinkedIn’s mobile app makes it a lot easier for you to engage and connect with people inside and outside of your connections whilst on the move. Liking, commenting and sharing valuable posts will help to boost engagement, and more importantly shows that you’re an active member of the LinkedIn community. Participating in these ‘mini activities’ takes no more than 30 seconds, and should be an important part of you being active on LinkedIn.

Your profile is missing the basics

LinkedIn is your professional identity and not including basic information such as recent education history just exclaims that you’re not serious about being on this platform. If a potential employer for a job you were interested in was to search for prospective job candidates and you don’t have the information that they search for on your profile, then you’re missing out big time and have just caused yourself an injustice.

On the other hand, if a potential client were to search for your services and after stumbling on your profile, if you’re missing basic information like experience, skills, well thought out headline and more, this doesn’t leave a good impression which could cause loss of business. Having lots of information helps to make your profile more optimised and will get LinkedIn to index your profile properly.

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