Ten Tips for a better LinkedIn profile 4/10
Your LinkedIn Profile is certainly your first, and can be your last chance to make a positive impression online.
It’s a combination of a sales pitch, a personal presentation, a business card, a brochure, a personal statement, a list of recommendations, a mini web-site, and a wave from across the room. It has a lot of work to do, and it only has a few seconds to either succeed or fail in doing that work. So — how do you make it a success?
This is the fourth of Ten Top Tips with my compliments, to help you make your LinkedIn Profile more effective. Enjoy!
Don’t want to read this? Listen to it on SoundCloud (1m 48s)
Ten Top Tips for a Better LinkedIn Profile: 4/10
Tip 4: Talk to me!
I am lazy. I can’t be bothered reading — my eyes get tired looking at computer screens, and my attention span is short. I give your profile only partial attention — my email may distract me, or my RSS feed might pop up with something of interest, the phone rings… so why not tell me a little story — literally?
Record a 40-second message that tells me what you do, and how I can benefit from it, and what I need to do to get it. Some people do not “get it” when they read something — they need to hear it to understand how you can help them. So if you don’t tell them… they don’t know.
Start with SoundCloud
Setting up a Soundcloud account is a two minute task. Adding the app to your phone is about as complicated. Then you can record your personal statement. Or go to People per Hour or Freelancer.com (or search on LinkedIn) to find a voiceover artist to record something for you which you can upload to Soundcloud, and then embed on your profile.
You will probably need to edit any recording, and for PC or Mac owners, an excellent free resource for recording and editing your sound files is Audacity — or with a Mac, you can also use Garageband. On my iPhone, I use AudioCopy, which is simple, flexible and free, and uploads files straight to SoundCloud.
You can also create a movie for YouTube which is actually a still image or a slideshow, with your soundtrack or voice recording added to back it.
So in a nutshell:
Use sound! Talk. The pitch and quality of your voice will let me connect with you as a human being. Add your phone number at the end, and remind people of that number, and you can expect the phone to start ringing more often…
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David Petherick is Director of First Impressions at Amazes.Me and makes your online presence visible, legible and credible at I Own My Own Name. Follow him on Twitter at @petherick_ or circle him on Google Plus. Please feel free to connect on LinkedIn
You can listen to all of David’s Tips for a better LinkedIn Profile at https://soundcloud.com/petherick/sets/linkedin-top-ten-tips
Originally published at www.linkedin.com on December 2, 2014.
