Ten Tips for a better LinkedIn profile 6/10
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 sixth 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 (2m 21s)
Ten Top Tips for a Better LinkedIn Profile: 6/10
Tip 6: Be human…
Tell me about you. And talk to me as an individual. I may be interested in the fact that you like scuba diving and cricket. Then again I may not…
I may have a lifetime of loathing for Manchester United, but at least I can start a conversation with you a little more easily now that I know you support them, or send you an appropriate message when your football team wins (or loses) the league. Your love of horses, funk music or fine wines is something I may connect with.
I don’t want to just learn about your business, I want to feel I have had the equivalent of a chat over a cup of coffee with you, or a drink or two, and have got to know you a little.
Online, you don’t get a chance for ‘social chit chat’ with too many people, other than perhaps in Twitter exchanges or following updates on LinkedIn — so you profile should include an element of this.
People buy people — don’t disappoint them
People buy people, whatever their business is. And if you’re not a person people want to buy, you are making things difficult for yourself. So talk about yourself, and show your enthusiasms and passions. It’s OK to talk about things that excite and motivate you, or confess that you don’t like rudeness.
One of the most effective ways of illustrating what interests you is through photography — a collage, for example, can give a more rounded picture. The photographs you use can be resized and cropped — a very useful free online too to help you is at http://www.picresize.com/ — it crops and resizes images from your computer with ease. Another great free tool for easy collages and captions is canva.com
A list of all the countries in the world you have visited may be fun, but doesn’t it strike you that I’d rather see a photo of a great building you admired in Kuala Lumpur, or a child’s smile spotted around the corner of a bead curtain, than just to know that you’d stopped over in KL and ticked it off your list?
Be interesting. Be human.
So in a nutshell:
Show people what makes you tick, what interests you, what you are proud of, and what things are really important to you. People buy people, and they buy their loves and passions.
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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 16, 2014.
