7 Missed Opportunities in LinkedIn

by | Feb 24, 2018 | Social Media

Are you making the most of your LinkedIn presence?

Don’t overlook these seven often-missed opportunities to increase your effectiveness on LinkedIn.

1. Not completing your profile

The first thing to do in LinkedIn is create a complete profile. Here are great tips on being bold in your LinkedIn profile from the MAKERS Conference.

Be sure to complete every field, until LinkedIn identifies your profile as “all-star.” You don’t have do it all at once. You can set aside time each week to work on one section at a time. Start from the top and work down:

2. Not keeping your profile up to date

Each month, add something new to your profile. Did you start a new job? Take on a new project? Complete a course or a certification? Publish a paper?

If you finished a work project that can be shared publicly, add it to your profile. Maybe it’s a multimedia presentation or a video or a podcast. Just make sure it doesn’t include any company confidential information and that it can be made public.

It was a thrill to see my employer, AT&T, included again on Fortune’s 2018 list of 100 Best Companies to Work For. As a proud member of our Employee Engagement Advisory Board to make the company a great place to work for all, I added the company news release to my LinkedIn profile. (Note: opinions expressed in this blog are my own.)

3. Not customizing your public profile URL

Not personalizing your URL is like using an aol.com email address. It marks you as out of touch and not current.

Customizing your URL gives you a personally branded link to include in event apps where participants share their social media handles, your email signature, your bio if you’re giving a speech, and your resume if you still maintain a separate document from LinkedIn.

This feature uses your name in your LinkedIn URL, rather than a random string of numbers. It will appear like this: linkedin.com/in/yourname or in my case as linkedin.com/in/leachcaroline.

If someone else already has your name, try putting your last name first or adding your middle initial. Make your URL as similar to your other social media handles as you can.

In my case, based on what was available, I use leachcaroline for LinkedIn and Facebook and @caroline_leach for Instagram and Twitter.

4. Not personalizing your professional headline

Right under your name in your LinkedIn profile is your professional headline. It defaults to your current job title. But you can and should change it. Here’s why.

Your headline appears frequently throughout LinkedIn. It’s displayed in search results and when you comment on others’ content.

If you don’t personalize your headline, you’re missing a big opportunity to personally brand yourself.

Here are tips to make the most of your headline by using keywords and benefits statements about you and what you do.

Headlines have been limited to 120 characters. But Wayne Breitbarth shared a new tip about how recent LinkedIn changes benefit you.

If you update your headline in your mobile app (not your desktop), he says, you get 220 characters. As he notes, that 83% more space to tell your story.

5. Not using a background photo

Just as customizing your professional headline helps you better tell your story, so does adding a background photo. This is the photo that appears right above your profile photo.

If you don’t include a customized photo, your profile looks similar to everyone else’s with the standard blue background of connecting points and lines. It doesn’t stand out or attract attention.

Ideally, use a photo you’ve taken yourself that shows the essence of your professional self in an image. Here are other tips on telling your story through your background photo.

6. Not experimenting with content

If you’re not currently sharing updates and articles in LinkedIn, get started by observing what you gravitate toward in your LinkedIn “home” feed. What catches your eye? What makes you want to watch the featured video or click on an article link?

Start to “like” content that reflects your professional interests. Engage further by adding a comment that adds another perspective or asks a follow-up question. When you @mention the author, they’ll be notified of your comment and are more likely to see it and respond it.

Once you’ve done that, you can start experimenting with content of your own. Here are some ideas for sharing an idea, a photo or a video.

I did a month-long experiment to see what would happen when I posted to LinkedIn every weekday for a month. You could experiment by using video, varying types of posts, using different lengths of posts, trying out different hashtags, and so on.

You might be surprised by what you learn, as I was when I dug into my analytics. I learned that posting an inspirational leadership quote along with a striking photo on major holidays rose to the top of my content with the most engagement.

7. Not joining groups

LinkedIn expert Donna Serdoula advises joining the maximum allowed 100 groups, to enhance your visibility. You can follow groups that align with your areas of focus in your career and on LinkedIn.

Beyond that, she takes an interesting contrarian view. Don’t limit your groups to those comprised of colleagues in the same field as you, she advises.

Instead, “think in terms your target audience,” she says in her book on LinkedIn profile optimization. Who do you want to be found by? Recruiters? Colleagues? Potential customers?

Groups are an area I’ll explore in future posts. Why? Recently I posted content in a group and discovered serendipitously a great way to get that content amplified. This will be the topic of my next post, followed by a more detailed exploration of how to make the most of groups.

What other missed opportunities do you see?