CHAPTER 6

Build a Dazzling LinkedIn Profile

 

The Land of Digital Enchantment

Are you ready to build your brand in bits and bytes? We’re going to upgrade enchanté and create the e-version—or e-nchanté.

In this chapter, I’ll give you new insight into the most important elements of your LinkedIn profile, and I’ll share everything you need to know for crafting a profile that is magnetic and compelling. My approach is designed with efficiency in mind, so I am not going to cover every single possible category of content—just the ones that are absolutely critical to your success.

Don’t Confuse Complete With Compelling

LinkedIn gives you a percentage score for your profile. But that’s not much of a metric. It just measures whether or not you have put something in every bucket. I have seen lots of lackluster profiles that scored 100 percent. Focus on the quality of your profile, not the quantity of your full buckets.

The most important components, and the ones we’ll work on, are:

• The Big Three

• Contact

• Validation

The Big Three

Out of all the bells and whistles, there are three key elements of your profile that make a major difference when it comes to delivering your first impression and enticing people to want to know more. They are headshot, headline, and summary:

• Headshot. Your photo helps viewers connect a face with a name, and it makes you real in the often nebulous, impersonal world of the web.

• Headline. Think of this as the headline for an ad. Its job? To grab readers’ attention.

• Summary (“About”). This is the place that lets you come alive in the digital world. Surprisingly, many people on LinkedIn don’t even fill out the summary (now labeled the “about”) section.

I devote a lot of this chapter to these three important elements. If you don’t get these right, you’ll miss out on the true value of LinkedIn. Let’s look at these vital ingredients individually:

Your Headshot

In a world where most people meet us online before they meet us in person, our audience wants to connect a face with a name. Your headshot makes you real in the weird world of the web. In addition, it helps you get noticed in LinkedIn.

Fun Fact

Do This, Not That

Do invest in a professional headshot. Have a photo taken specifically for this purpose. A sloppy, blurry snapshot makes you look like a sloppy, blurry amateur.

Don’t use a selfie. All pictures are not created equal. Just having a picture in your profile is not enough to get people to want to engage with you.

Your headshot should add credibility to your profile—so make it professional. It’s not just about having a photo. It’s about having the right photo. Make your mug work for you on LinkedIn:

Fill the frame. Crop so that your face captures about 70-80 percent of the space. Your uploaded picture shows up in a circle, but the dimensions are 400 by 400 pixels. Remember that the shot will be used as a thumbnail when you participate in other features on LinkedIn, appearing far beyond the top of your listing. Whole body shots are too small to see—especially in sections like endorsements.

Face forward. Look into the eyes of the person who’s checking you out. Don’t look off-screen. This is your first impression!

Avoid the glum “I’m a serious professional” look. Ron Gutman’s TED Talk, “The Hidden Power of Smiling,” references a Penn State study that showed “when we smile, we not only appear more likeable and courteous, but we’re actually perceived to be more competent.” So smiling helps with both your LPTI Likability and Credibility measures!

Refer to chapter 7 for detailed advice on getting the best photo for LinkedIn and other social media.

Your Headline

Your headline’s purpose is to get your target audience to want to read on. Yet most LinkedIn members think “headline = job title.” If you don’t write a headline, LinkedIn uses your current job title as a default, and that’s a total bore.

When you limit your headline to your job title, like “Senior Manager, Risk and Compliance,” you’re making yourself a commodity—interchangeable with anyone else who shares that job title. To have your headline work for you, it should say what you do and entice people to learn more about your services. Don’t make it all about you; make it about the people you serve. Tell viewers what you can do for them. It also needs to feature the keywords you want associated with your name. Use all 120 characters to solve these goals simultaneously. Here’s the formula:

Be relevant + Be loyal + Be found + Be interesting

Job title + Company + Keywords + Zing

BRAND HACK

Here are some examples of effective headlines:

• #1 Relationship Author | Coaching & Consulting Leaders, Teams & Organizations on Improving Efficiency & Effectiveness

• Director of Business Development & Events Marketing—Building Lasting Impressions for Exhibitions & Events

• Talent Acquisition Leader, PMP—Attracting and Hiring the Best Talent in STEM and Project Management

• Human Resources Director, Compensation, Benefits & Talent Development Leader—Engaging Our People, Developing Leaders, Retaining Superstars

And one more major don’t: If you’re currently between formal jobs, don’t use hollow headlines such as “Seeking my next big adventure” or “Currently open to new opportunities.” Those will work against you in a search (where are your keywords?) and the implication that you’re not being productive right now makes you less attractive to some prospective employers. Recruiters favor employed passive candidates over those who are actively seeking employment. So focus on what you are doing. If you think you aren’t doing anything, it’s time to get moving on your side hustle or volunteer activities.

Your Summary (About)

After seeing your headshot and reading your headline, viewers of your profile check out your summary (titled “About” on the platform). This section piques their interest and makes them want to learn more.

Your summary is a story—your story. Make it an interesting and compelling narrative of you, what you’re passionate about, and how you deliver value to your clients and colleagues. It needs to express the real you for those who meet you first online, so make a special effort to infuse it with your personality.

The old school of summary writing consisted of a series of credentials strung together in prose form. That won’t cut it today. As your first impression, your LinkedIn summary has to do a lot more heavy lifting. Use it to paint a 3D portrait of who you are and tell people why they want to get to know you. It’s time to take a look at your brand bio from chapter 3 and refine it for this medium.

MINDSET RESET

Do This, Not That

Do be opinionated. Personal branding is not about trying to please everyone. Be courageous and show the world that you have a point of view.

Don’t mimic. If you use your summary to fit in, you’ll be lost in a sea of replicants, not the professional who shimmers.

Make the first three lines of your summary magnetic. When someone looks at your LinkedIn profile, only the first three lines of your summary are visible. Readers need to click “see more” to read the full story. If those first few lines aren’t intriguing, viewers may not take action to see the rest.

“Because we tend to view our personal social media accounts as being ‘personal,’ there’s a good chance that by viewing someone’s profile, you’ll get a glimpse into their personality beyond the resume,” says DeeAnn Sims, founder of marketing firm SPBX.

Your summary has the most potential to connect you emotionally with viewers of your profile. It can attract and it can repel. So getting your sum-mary right is essential. To get you started, see Figure 6-1 for six helpful tips.

I have read thousands of LinkedIn summaries and realized that the best ones start in one of these six ways. Here are examples of those critical first few lines in each of the six categories. This will give you a feel for how it works. Next, I’ve shared examples of some of the most authentic, differentiated, and compelling summaries I have read (and I have read a lot of summaries).

1. Purpose

People are my business. I believe it’s more important to be interested than interesting, and it’s my mission to really get to know each person I meet and to build deep, trust-based relationships with them. This is true in my personal life and in my role of account manager for web development services.

2. Promise

I accelerate your business performance through the power of people. It’s my mission to find the most qualified, interesting, and engaged professionals on earth and help you bring them onto your team. How do I do it? I combine my inquisitive nature with my power networking and research skills to uncover exceptional, hidden talent.

3. Punctuated List

Lifelong learner. Loyal corporate citizen with an entrepreneurial spirit. Curious questioner of “all things tech.” My job title is product researcher, but I act as if I’m an owner. In that capacity, I’m committed to innovating (especially through technology) and to making decisions that meet the strategic needs of our product team.

4. Point in Time

I was working at a startup in Silicon Valley when a member of my team told me about a new company that was combining artificial intelligence with data analytics to deliver insights and predict customer actions. I became intrigued by value this would provide to our sales team.

(This is also the style I chose for my LinkedIn Summary: www.linkedin.com/in/williamarruda.)

5. Passion

Five. Seven. Eighty-Three. Those are the number of languages I speak, countries I have lived in, and major cities I’ve visited—in that order. When you grow up the daughter of a diplomat, it’s easy to be a citizen of the world. My itinerant lifestyle and passion for travel and diverse cultures inspired me to pursue a career in international relations. Now, as the head of …

6. Provocative Phrase

My business is going downhill—fast. I’m an outdoor enthusiast, former professional skier, and the founder of the Ski Academy. Skiing can be the antidote to life’s constant stressors. I’m committed to building invigorating experiences that help people …

Select Your Sizzling Start

Take a look at the content you prepared in chapter 3 and determine which of the six sizzling starts described here will be best for you. Then, work on the first few lines of your summary. They’re like the wall a swimmer pushes against to fuel the next lap. Getting them right gives you the momentum you need to craft the rest of your summary—the most-read version of your bio.

After you have mastered your kickoff, weave together content from the six content buckets you filled in chapter 3, or just edit the long-play version of your bio that you wrote in that chapter. And save some of your 2,000 characters for two really important elements that you’ll use just in your LinkedIn profile:

• AKA/common misspellings

• specialties.

Common Misspellings

Don’t assume others know how you spell your name or know that you’ve changed your name. Include all known misspellings, previous names, nicknames, and aliases in your summary. That way, even if people don’t know the correct spelling of your name or the fact that you changed your name or go by a nickname, they’ll still end up at your profile. In addition to focusing on your target audience, don’t forget one very important reader of your profile: Google’s search algorithm.

Specialties

Repeat your keywords as often as possible in your profile. One easy way to do that is to take the words you want to associate yourself with and list them in order of importance at the bottom of your summary. Remember to include the keywords related to where you want to be next. Although personal branding is grounded in authenticity, there’s an important aspirational element. Make yourself relevant for what’s next.

Congrats, You Made It

That’s it! When you enhance those elements, you take your profile from average to awesome, OK to OMG, ow to wow. And you establish a powerful first impression with those who are checking you out.

When you’re happy with your draft summary, test it with these two methods: Get feedback and ask yourself questions.

Get Feedback

Identify at least three trusted people to provide honest feedback:

• a member of your target audience

• a mentor, coach, or trusted advisor who wants you to succeed

• a personal friend or family member who knows you well.

Ask Yourself Questions

Use the questions from the following Ponder This as your guide.

PONDER THIS

Finalize your summary, refining it based on the feedback you received and the edits your questioning spawns. Then upload the final version to your profile and bask in the wonderful comments you receive from your LinkedIn connections.

Take a look at Brandi’s summary. It’s drawn from the results of her exercises in chapter 3, and it uses Start With a Bang approaches 4 and 6 (point in time and provocative phrase).

Brandi Brainstorms

Contact

Make it easy for people to connect with you and learn more about you.

First, edit your vanity URL so it reads: linkedin.com/in/yourname. Then, add the ways you’d like people to contact you (email address, phone number, Twitter handle, and so on). Lastly, use the three website links to point to other places that help you expand or reinforce your story. You can point to things like:

• your company website (show that you’re loyal to your employer) or to the section of the company website that talks about what you do

• YouTube videos you’re featured in

• articles you have written or are quoted in

• other examples of work you have done

• your social media accounts.

Validation

When it comes to branding yourself online, you need to tell people what makes you exceptional, and you need to prove what you say about yourself with input from others. Validate what you say in your summary with external proof in four areas:

• experience

• education

• endorsements

• recommendations.

Experience

Your experience blocks allow you to provide more details about what you wrote in your summary. Each block allows for a 2,000-character description. For each experience block, remember to choose the company you worked for from LinkedIn’s list so the company logo shows up.

Do This, Not That

Do be clear about the things you want to be known for today and what will make yourself relevant for tomorrow. Make sure your profile screams those things.

Don’t include details of every job you’ve had. Omit (or combine under a heading like “previous experience”) your early jobs that don’t offer insights to how you deliver value today.

Education

List all your education, including continuing education you’ve completed since graduation. Choosing your school from the LinkedIn list is one more way to add proof (and your school’s logo) to your profile.

Endorsements

Let’s face it. Endorsements seem silly. Yet we make judgments about people based on the skills for which they were endorsed, and LinkedIn showcases those skills in a way that delivers tremendous visual impact. Only the three skills with the most endorsements show up when someone looks at your profile. Viewers need to click “show more” to see the rest of your skills, but it’s critical that you emphasize the three most important skills that you want people to associate with you.

BRAND HACK

Be ungrateful. By that I mean be willing to delete endorsements for skills that just muddy the waters. Personal branding requires focus and potency.

Recommendations

When others praise you, they provide the credibility that bolsters your brand. LinkedIn’s recommendations feature helps you prove what you say about yourself in your profile. The most powerful recommendations meet as many of these criteria as possible. A recommendation is helpful based on:

• What it says. A useful recommendation is more than just glowing words. Those words should reinforce how you want to be known—highlighting proof of what makes you great.

• Who says it. Testimonials that come from people who are revered in your community or who have a senior or respected job title have more weight.

• Where the recommender works. When your recommender comes from a well-known, respected brand, some of that brand value rubs off on you in terms of brand association.

How do you get recommendations? First, make sure the person whose recommendation you seek is one of your LinkedIn connections.

Do This, Not That

Do use your personal or work email for your recommendation request. It will be more likely that you’ll get a response, and it will give you the opportunity to influence what it says.

Don’t request a LinkedIn recommendation from within LinkedIn until you have asked your recommender if it’s OK to send a request through LinkedIn. Busy people often ignore messages that come from LinkedIn.

To make your recommendation reinforce what you want people to associate with you, when you make your email request, offer reminders of how you have provided value to the recommender, or even provide a basic draft of the recommendation, with a note like this:

Then, in your draft, highlight the attributes that will be most helpful to bolstering your brand. Of course, you need to have demonstrated those attributes!

Even if they choose to ignore what you have sent, you have likely influenced what they’re thinking as they prepare to write their recommendation.

Completing Your Profile

You don’t need me or this book to help you complete your profile, filling out the remaining sections on specifics ranging from publications to volunteer work. The LinkedIn “help” feature will give you answers to any questions related to those straightforward elements. Because they’re so easy to complete, it’s tempting to spend a lot of time on those sections. Resist the urge. Spend your time and energy on honing the crucial components covered in-depth in this chapter.

Do This, Not That

Do know the difference between complete and compelling. Focus less on filling in every box and more on making what you put in the boxes significant.

Don’t use LinkedIn’s profile metric of completeness as a measure of how powerful your profile is.

Beyond LinkedIn

Before we move from words to pictures in the next section, there’s one more thing to do: Transfer what you learned about your digital first impression and LinkedIn to other social media that you plan to use for building your brand.

There are several tools that I think are especially valuable to most career-minded professionals: Twitter, YouTube, SlideShare, Instagram, and Facebook. Of course, there are dozens of other potential platforms to check out. Ultimately, you should choose the ones that will help you express your message to the people who count. We’ll talk more about these tools in part 4, but for now, I want to focus on creating a powerful first impression with social media beyond LinkedIn. Here’s what you need to do:

1. Claim your vanity URL. For the social media tools you’d like to use but still haven’t set up an account for (and for the tools that you think you might want to use sometime in the future) go to Knowem.com and put your name in the search box. It will reveal which sites still have your name available.

2. Set up your profile.

3. Add your headshot and bio—make them relevant to the style and type of platform. For example, you might use your most professional headshot for LinkedIn, but use a more casual one on Instagram or Facebook. See Table 6-1 for specs.

Table 6-1. Social Media Bio/Photo Specs

PLATFORM	BIO CHARACTER LIMIT	PHOTO DIMENSIONS
Twitter	160	400 x 400 pixels, 2MB
SlideShare (Slideshare.net)	700	96 x 96 pixels, 500KB
YouTube	980 (called channel description)	800 x 800 pixels
Instagram	150	110 x 110 pixels
Facebook	100 (called intro)	At least 180 x 180 pixels

As for Twitter, even if you think tweeting is more appropriate for Justin Bieber than for you, it’s a valuable tool for increasing your visibility on the web—even if you don’t have any followers yet (more on that in part 4).

Writing your Twitter bio is an excellent branding exercise because it makes you distill your brand into just 160 characters. And because it’s Twitter, it gives you an opportunity to be playful with your prose. The next Ponder This shares my process for gathering the raw content to craft it.

PONDER THIS

Brandi Brainstorms

And here’s my Twitter bio—coming in at 155 characters:

Summing Up

Feeling accomplished? In chapter 6, you focused your branding activities on delivering a powerful digital first impression—one that’s aligned with your real-world brand. You have a LinkedIn profile that will introduce you to your brand community—a profile that will be the envy of your peers. Phew! Now, we’re going to take a little break from creating the text you use to describe yourself. In chapter 7, we’ll turn our attention from words to pictures, and we’ll discuss how to be real through vivid visuals in the nebulous and often confusing world of the web. So get ready to have some fun with photos.