5 Things to make your LinkedIn Profile look more Professional

LinkedIn is a great tool for one’s professional career, whether it includes a start-up business venture, a search for a job, or maybe just interactions with your work colleagues. One could almost say it’s essential for professional careers, especially online ones such as freelancing, blogging, and other online businesses. Hence, it is important to the things we discuss here on this blog. We recently discussed how you could improve your Google Plus status. So continuing the trend, we shall talk about LinkedIn today, and discuss 5 ways you could give your profile a professional touch in order to attain a greater level of success through LinkedIn.

1. Complete your profile

You want to make your profile look professional? Well, complete it first! I’ve seen tonnes of people who, although seem to have a complete profile, still have some percentage left unfilled. It’d be a good idea to use LinkedIn’s Profile completion Tips. They will show you your progress, and what you can do to complete it.

An important thing to fill out is the headline and summary. The headline should tell the world and potential head-hunters who you are, and what you can do for them, at a glance. A summary will tell them more about you. Make sure you take your time, and think well before updating your headline and summary. Just like a resume, your LinkedIn profile is a way for the world to know how qualified you are. It acts just like a CV. So make sure you fill in all your educational and work details. Also upload a high resolution, and professional looking photo for your display image.

However, there is one thing you should be mindful of. LinkedIn will broadcast your profile updates to the outer world. So if people from among your connections see that you updated your profile for getting a higher post in your organization. This will make them think you got the job only recently. So you should turn off Activity Broadcast temporarily while you’re updating your profile. You can disable it by going into Settings, and then clicking onto ‘Privacy‘.

2. Learn Business writing

As a business professional, you cannot afford to write casually on your profile, not at least for your profile information. The first thing you should know is, if there’s a grammatical error in your profile info, then that’s the deal-breaker right there. Here’s why you’ll lose your job prospects due to poor grammar. So make sure you proof-read your profile info, just to be sure.

Also, in your profile info, you will have to be factual, and not use figurative language at all. Business professionals don’t care for such, and neither should you. Do not appeal to others’ emotions. Rather, appeal to their logic, so they’ll be convinced. Also, please don’t lie about what you can, and can’t do. There’s no tolerance for that kind of thing in the business world. So speak honestly.

3. Customize URL

This might be kind of repetitive, and we say it in a lot of posts, but that doesn’t make it any less important. You should customize your LinkedIn profile URL (which is a string of random numbers by default). To change this, go to Settings >> Edit public profile >> Customize your public profile URL. Choose something most closely related to your name (for eg, mine is qasimzaib, which is the same for Twitter and Facebook, and even Google Plus).

4. LinkedIn requests

When you send someone a request, LinkedIn usually fills in the message with a default one. You can customize yours to make it look more professional. It not only tells the other person who you are, it also gives a good impression, and shows you’re not here to just add people randomly.

5. Badges

Another thing you could do to promote your LinkedIn profile is to use LinkedIn badges on your website. These badges will link to your profile, and will direct potential head-hunters, and other connections towards your LinkedIn profile. Besides, having an active LinkedIn profile shows that you are a professional, and like to stay connected on LinkedIn.

As a bonus, here’s another tip. Use the LinkedIn apps on various platforms, such as Android, iOS etc. It shows that you like to stay connected, and can be relied upon for a response. All these small things you could do on your profile to make it look more professional. A highly professional profile is the key to getting a professional business contact through LinkedIn. Hope these tips work out for you. Cheers 🙂