When you see profiles written in the third person, typically the reason is that they simply copied and pasted their biography or resume into the LinkedIn profile. That’s a cop-out! Your LinkedIn profile is not your resume nor your bio. Your LinkedIn profile is your career future! It’s who you are, how you help people, and why you deserve to be noticed. A powerful LinkedIn profile is strategically written for your goals and your target audience. It’s not a copy and paste of some other document.
While the best profiles are written in first person, there are times when other styles work better. For example, if you are in sales and marketing and your profile is written with the goal of engaging potential clients, second person works great: “If you want to up your game and improve your productivity, our CRM solution will help you save time and … .” Notice how the focus is on the person reading the profile.
If you are a person with a long list of accomplishments and awards, it may feel more comfortable writing about your successes in third person: “After winning the Nobel Peace Prize, Jane Doe sold her company for $33 billion and decided to dedicate the rest of her career to saving the rain forests.”
Think about your target audience and your brand, then tailor your voice accordingly.
Using the Different Versions of LinkedIn
Part of your LinkedIn strategy should extend to your use of LinkedIn as well as how your target audience typically accesses LinkedIn. At one time, LinkedIn was a site you accessed via a browser on your desktop computer or laptop. With the rise of mobile devices and apps that run on them, LinkedIn has extended the features and functionality of its desktop experience to a mobile app.
Since debuting its mobile app, LinkedIn’s success has exploded, and it makes sense why. Even though LinkedIn is a professional platform, many companies block the use of LinkedIn over the company’s Internet connection, which means in order to access LinkedIn, one would have to do it at home after work. Who wants to do professional stuff after work? Once LinkedIn was accessible via the mobile app using personal mobile data, LinkedIn could be used anywhere and everywhere. Waiting for a meeting to start? Click the LinkedIn app on your smartphone and scroll through your LinkedIn feed to see what’s going on with your network. Grabbing lunch at the local deli? Check the LinkedIn profiles of the people who you’ll be pitching later today via the mobile app.
Fewer than half of all LinkedIn users access the site via a browser on a computer or laptop. If you find that you struggle to find time to access LinkedIn, it may be because you are only accessing it from a computer. Install the mobile app on your smartphone and you may be surprised at the frequency with which you begin to access it.
Next up I look at how to get found on LinkedIn.
Chapter 2
Getting Found on LinkedIn
IN THIS CHAPTER
LinkedIn helps people connect with opportunity. Whether it’s a new job, a sale, a media interview, a business partnership, or something else entirely, many times the connection starts with a LinkedIn search.
At the time of this writing, LinkedIn has over 575 million users in over 200 countries. Of those 575 million users, 260 million are active on a monthly basis, and 40 percent are engaging on a daily basis (https://kinsta.com/blog/linkedin-statistics). Making sure your profile sticks out and pops up is important. In this chapter, I show you how people use LinkedIn as a search engine. I show you the importance of your search result listing and how to make it attractive and clickable. I also show you how to discover your keywords and how to infuse them into your profile for higher search engine ranking. By the time you finish this chapter, you will have a list of your keywords and the knowledge of how to dominate LinkedIn search results.
Using LinkedIn as a Search Engine
Getting views to your profile doesn’t always start through an Internet search. LinkedIn is more than just a professional network and profile listing. LinkedIn is a different type of search engine. Most search engines return websites. Searches conducted via a LinkedIn search return LinkedIn profiles, company pages, job listings, reader-published posts and blog articles, and LinkedIn Groups. LinkedIn search is also used to find potential customers, vendors, service providers, and employees.
Using the search bar
On the top of LinkedIn’s website is the search bar. This is where most people enter their search terms. When people search LinkedIn, they search in two different ways: name or keyword. A direct name search is typically performed after a resume has been received or when a person has met you and is looking to connect on LinkedIn. The person doing the search is looking for one, specific person.
Most times, people are searching not for a specific person but for a type of person with distinct skill sets and strengths. In this situation, the person conducting the search enters those skill sets as keywords into the LinkedIn search bar. As the keywords are entered, LinkedIn’s search bar presents a drop-down menu with suggested results (see Figure 2-1). However, rather than selecting from the drop-down list, you can press the Enter or Return key on your keyboard or you can click the magnifying glass that appears to the right of the search bar when it’s active to visit a full page of search results. For example, Figure 2-2 shows the results of a LinkedIn search for the keywords “Customer Success Manager.” The search results display profiles that contain those keywords. Your profile never displays as a search result listing if those keywords do not exist within the profile. Therefore, to get found in searches, your profile must contain the keywords a person is using in the search.
FIGURE 2-1: The search drop-down list suggests results for you.