LinkedIn is a brilliant social media platform for you to build a professional brand, showcase your achievements and skills, share content with other professionals within your industry, and connect with colleagues, business partners, and potential employers.

A variety of different people will come across your profile through:

• searching for employees at your company
• remembering you from a networking event and reminding themselves about your ongoing projects
• liking and commenting on the same posts relating to the industry you're in
• wanting to learn more about you and your accomplishments before hiring you. 

No matter the reason, for them to end up on your LinkedIn page, however, there’s an initial shared and simple goal: to capture and keep their attention on you, your products and what you have to offer.

So what makes a profile on LinkedIn stand out? What features on the platform can help you enhance your profile? And how can it be used to improve business this year? Our blog here can help you create the perfect LinkedIn profile to achieve the goals you've set out for yourself. Just follow each step and make the most out of this social media platform.

1. Upload a great quality profile picture

First things first, upload a great profile picture that is recent, looks like you and your face takes up around 60 percent of the total space. The goal is to look like you normally do on a daily basis at work, in turn making it easier for prospective contacts who may have only met you virtually to recognise you from the reliable source they've seen before - your profile picture.

2. Add a cover (banner) photo

Along with your profile photo, you can also set a wider photo that showcases a bit more about you. Here, it’s not as important that you are in the image, but you want to make memorable and informative for visitors to know more about you. For example, if you’re a professional fitness instructor, you might opt for an action shot of yourself in the gym working with a client with your contact information clearly within the image. Whereas, a graphic designer may choose to showcase their latest project within the cover image to show off the skills they are capable of.

3. Include your pronouns

Over the last couple of years, LinkedIn has added the feature of including a person's pronouns to their profile. This is an important part of the remote and in-person work ecosystem, and by adding them up-front you can avoid any awkwardness later on. Whether it’s she/her, he/him, they/them or another combination that best fits your identity, including your pronouns is always worth it.

4. Create an eye-catching headline

Adding a short description about your current role, what you’ve accomplished and what your focus is, is an amazing way to introduce yourself to a network of people on LinkedIn. So add a little detail in that section at the top of your profile. Check out the following examples to help you come up with the perfect headline for your LinkedIn profile:

• I help growing businesses increase their visibility online by 1000%; helping them gain more leads and enquiries than ever before, without having to spend loads of time creating content, paid ads or social media posts themselves.
• Founder & CEO, Inbound Marketing Strategist, Mother of 5
• Copywriter | Author | Blogger
• Award-winning coach & motivational business speaker 🎤 I work with individuals & teams to grow confidence, visibility & clients. Download my e-Guide
• Helping People Build Wealth Through Property In The UK, France, Italy and Greece
• Content creator and digital marketer helping support animal welfare, animal rescue and wildlife conservation causes.

5. Tell your story

Like everyone, you’ve got a story to tell, and your LinkedIn bio summary lets you tell it however you want. Not only is a great place to list your recent jobs or most valuable skills, but it’s also great potential to connect with prospective employers and colleagues by providing more information about who you are, your journey to your current job, and what you are looking for next.

6. Limit the jargon

Buzzwords and jargon don’t offer any real insights into you — instead, they’re a generic rehashing of terms people have seen hundreds of times before, and it gets unnecessarily boring. So our advice, cut the buzzwords, and focus on being clear and specific about you and your career.

7. Highlight your skills

One of the most important parts of your LinkedIn profile is your skill list, all you have to do is simply search and select skills that match your experience and expertise, but this comes with a word of caution: The sheer number of skills available on LinkedIn makes it easy to go overboard and inundate your profile with talents that are only tangentially related to current or prospective work. While highlighting your skills is critical, it is up to you to make sure they’re 100% relevant.

8. Sync your profile with your email address book

Equipped with this type of data, you encourage LinkedIn algorithms to recommend connections who are in the same industry as you, that share similar interests or offer endorsements for your skills. And since you get to manage the people you become connections with, you’re always in control of who gets contacted.

NOTE: make sure you’ve got company permission if you’re using your assigned work email address.

9. Customise your connection invites

While many connections occur organically on LinkedIn, there will be situations where you’ll want to reach out to specific connections on the platform. For this, you will need to create a customised invite that provides information like who you are, what you do, and why it matters — along with a personalised message about why you wish to connect with them on LinkedIn.

10. Go public

If you want connections to find you, you need to make your profile public. It’s an easy process: simply head to your LinkedIn page and click on the “Me” button under your profile picture at the top of the page, then select “View Profile”. Now, you’ll see an option for Edit Public Profile and URL — select this and you can toggle your public profile status on and off, and control who can see your profile picture.

11. Customise your URL

While you’re on the Edit Profile and URL page, it’s worth customising your URL to make finding your profile all that much easier. When you first join LinkedIn, you’re automatically assigned a URL that contains parts of your first and last name, along with a random string of numbers that have no meaning. Remove the numbers and make your URL your full first and last name. If this is already taken, try adding something else like a middle initial or the industry you work in, or even a company name or something easy to identify.

12. Keep your location and contact info updated

Another way to help connections find you more easily is to include and update your location on your profile. When recruiters go looking for new talent, location is a key factor, so including your location helps businesses narrow their search more quickly and increases your chances of being contacted.

If your contact info is out of date, you may miss out on opportunities. While some connections will use the built-in LinkedIn messaging platform, others prefer emails or old school methods like phone calls. So keep your information current and you will increase the chances of getting connections with the people you want to be connected to on the social media platform.

13. Post and share content

It’s worth posting and sharing relevant content as part of your profile set up. If potential connections find and click through on great content from your profile, they’re more likely to come back. So get the ball rolling and start posting content asap, and from there on out be consistent with your posting so people can find you and your profile grows organically.

14. Stay connected and be present

This leads nicely to our next point - it’s also a good idea to stay connected once your profile is up and running. Visit LinkedIn regularly to keep up to date with the goings-on on the platform.  Simply just 15 minutes a day to see what you’ve missed, make comments on relevant posts and answer any messages received since the last time you visited your profile.

15. Request recommendations

LinkedIn provide 2 great features that highlight your areas of expertise - these are skill endorsements and recommendations. Consider reaching out to your connections, especially people you've worked with or know on a personal level, for recommendations that are relevant to your current role — or next career goal.

16. Follow people of interest

To ensure that you’re both engaging and connecting with the right people on LinkedIn, it’s worth finding and following people who share similar interests and are in the same industry as you. Even if they don’t directly align with your job role, cultivating a broad interest base can help boost the impact of your profile on the platform.

17. Make regular improvements

In addition to regularly interacting with new posts and engage with new connections on LinkedIn, it’s incredibly important to regularly update your profile with new information about your current job or job-seeking status, new skills and qualifications you’ve obtained, the projects you’ve been working on and completed etc. Not only is it good practice to demonstrate consistency, but it also shows that you’re continuing to grow and learn — important information prospective employers are always looking for.

Final Thoughts

The better your LinkedIn profile, the better your chances of capturing the attention of other professionals within your field of work, and finding new growth opportunities. And while there’s no such thing as a “perfect” LinkedIn profile, you can certainly get close by following these 17 simple tips.