How to create a LinkedIn profile that generates more leads and connections
By Joanna Mascarenhas (HiredHippo contributor) and Richmond Wong (Product @ HiredHippo)
LinkedIn is by far and away the best social networking platform to generate business leads, accounting for up to 80% of the leads in the B2B space. Not only does the platform have enormous global reach with 660 million members across the world, it also commands substantial attention from company decision makers, with about 45% of those who read LinkedIn articles in managerial roles, including directors, vice-presidents and C-suite executives.
“It’s critical that people represent themselves on LinkedIn with their best foot forward given how many potential employers and clients also use it. Part of that means knowing how to craft a professional, value-added profile that gives people a reason to want to connect and stay in touch with you,” says Adam Gellert, Founder of HiredHippo, an A.I.-driven jobs platform that upends the traditional job search by linking candidates with companies while dispensing with resumes and cover letters.
With this much “king-making” power concentrated in one place, it pays to learn how to tap into the benefits offered by LinkedIn.
Here are six ways to create an effective LinkedIn profile to both build more and better quality leads and connections:
Number One — A professional-looking photo: The first and perhaps most noticeable component in a profile is your photograph so it’s worth taking the time and expense to have it done professionally. It takes fractions of a second for someone to make an instinctive judgement about you based on your photograph, and it’s an initial judgement that can unfortunately adversely color everything else in your profile — including great work experience and accomplishments.
You’ll find people using portraits that do a disservice to their professional profile, including out-of-date, blurry, pixelated or taken in poor lighting or from unflattering angles which impact perceptions around their competence, professionalism and trustworthiness.
Perhaps even more detrimental are using photos that are overly social (such as nights out at the bar or at college parties), which might give potential contacts that the profile holder suffers from a lack of appropriate judgment.
If you prefer taking your Profile photo yourself, here are some great examples (encompassing both indoor and outdoor setting) and tips from a professional photographer.
Number Two — Competence triggers in the Headline: Rather than include just your current job title and company (as most people are content to do) in the Headline, take full advantage of the opportunity to “show not tell” afforded to you by the 120 character limit.
There are two ways to approach your Headline, which, along with your photo, are the first things that people see.
The first approach is that if you currently work (or have worked) at a well-recognized company, to put that name (or names) in your Headline. This would include generally recognized and global names such as Google, Twitter or Apple. It’s also a good idea to do the same if you have a well known brand within a market niche (Nielsen in the data insights market, or Bose within the audio space) or known regionally (Clearbanc and HomeStars within Canada).
Generally speaking, going this route builds immediate credibility much faster and more effectively than the second method below.
The second approach is to include quantifiable accomplishments (for example, “Built the sales team from 2 to 10 Account Managers” or “Grew sales from $3m to $4.5m over 2 years”) that immediately show (rather than tell) your competence and value proposition to the market and potential connections.
In both cases, take advantage of the Headline feature in the same way that the founders of RXBar did in their redesigned packaging: use specificity to convey your value to the market, and the benefits of connecting with you.
Ideally of course, you would be able to combine both approaches within the Headline character limit.
Number Three — Writing with relevance and specificity in your Summary and Profile Body: Your Summary is your chance to tell your professional story in your own words, “above the fold”. The story you tell shouldn’t be meandering however — it should be a succinct and well-defined overview of who you are, your experiences, and most importantly — what value you can provide the reader.
Specific things to write in order to maximize the impact of your Summary include biographical information relevant to your target connections (for example, foreign languages spoken or experiences living overseas) as well as more importantly, competence triggers such as work experience at well-recognized companies, skills, client/colleague endorsements and quantifiable results you’ve achieved in order to build credibility and familiarity (as much as can be done with the written word) with your readers.
LinkedIn has a showcase of Summaries from ten real-life user profiles. Examples 5 (Karen) and 6 (Gijo) stand out in particular for effectively combining relevant qualitative biographical details (for example, her husband’s cancer diagnosis as impetus for her desire to work with pharmaceutical ad clients as a way to connect to other people in similar medical situations) and quantifiable professional accomplishments (growing software product portfolios under him from “$5M to 1B in revenue”) into an engaging overall narrative that conveys their value to the marketplace in a punchy, pithy but still human manner.
How you write your Summary also applies to the rest of your profile, including descriptions of your work experience.
A key thing to notice is the conciseness of each of Karen and Gijo’s bulletpoints, which also at the same time also retain all the key details needed to make their point.
“The ability to convey complex details in as economical a way, while communicating the outcomes of your actions, becomes increasingly important as you connect with leads working in increasingly senior roles,” advises Gellert.
Finally, LinkedIn releases lists of their annual top-10 buzzwords, and it’s worth exercising caution around these (which include “motivated”, “creative” and “successful”) because they are basically meaningless if they are not quantified or qualified with examples of concrete accomplishments. Overuse of these buzzwords in your profile without quantification/qualification means (in the words of George Orwell), has the effect of blunting the power of your profile as would “a mass of Latin words fall[ing] upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outlines and covering up all the details”
The second reason to pay attention to these buzzwords is that almost everyone else is using them, which ultimately dilutes the power of these words to help your profile stand out to recruiters and leads amongst others in the LinkedIn universe. In fact, one expert recommends using no more than one of these keywords in your profile.
Number Four — The quality of your leads and network is directly related to how you vet your connections: What may not help you as much as you think is prioritizing quantity over quality; having a large number of contacts with whom you have little to no existing overlapping professional or personal interests will likely do you less good than you think.
Instead, as LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman suggested, you should be carefully vetting your connection requests. Accumulating a large number of connections that have very little alignment with your experience, expertise, background and career direction will likely not benefit you (in the form of job offers, helping you discover leads and close sales, etc) as much as you think.
Put another way, you want to be selling ice cream during the summer — not in the winter.
Rather than making the sheer number of connections your goal (a type of vanity metric — ie. it makes you look/feel good but doesn’t move you closer to your goals), you should instead be focused on making targeted connections in much the same way businesses value high-quality traffic that convert into actual sales (and not just “likes” on their Instagram).
Of course, part of your LinkedIn strategy may be to deliberately accumulate a large number of connections so as to be perceived as an influencer in your field via the social proof effect.
But don’t make this your only strategy and perhaps more importantly — be 100% honest with yourself that — notwithstanding your large following — whether your network is actually effective in terms of creating meaningful opportunities you actually value.
Focus instead on what really moves your ambitions forward in a substantive way — ie. high-quality connections aligned what who you are and the value you can create with your accumulated experiences and expertise that you can offer to your network in a way they find meaningful.
Number Five — Actively engaging with the community: Engaging with those already within your network, as well as those outside, is a great way to grow your standing on the platform, as well as in your industry.
LinkedIn offers three content formats for you to post, share and comment on:
- Videos
- Posts (text and photo)
- Articles
In terms of how to prioritize content creation, it’s important to know that LinkedIn currently promotes video posts the most heavily in the update Feed (in order to compete with other video platforms such as YouTube and Instagram videos), with articles receiving the least promotion.
Content categories you can consider include:
- How-to’s
- Opinions
- Industry news or updates
- Achievements (business or personal — though see below about refraining from making things overly personal)
- Upcoming events
- Announcements
- Lessons learned
Your target audience can be split into three general buckets:
- General professionals
- Professionals within your industry/job function
- Potential clients
Depending on your goal, you may want to grow your overall number of connections by casting a wider net and targeting general professionals rather than go after more specific groups. Content of this type would include generalized career advice applicable to multiple industries (for example, how to ask for a raise or promotion, how to approach a career change, or how best to take advantage of networking events).
Content geared towards those in your industry will have a more specialized focus that generally only they will find relevant. For salespeople, this might include lessons on how to best generate leads over social networks, or tried-and-tested ways of increasing client retention for customer success specialists.
Finally, when creating content for potential customers, rather than offering a straight sales pitch, it’s far more effective to pair it alongside with an educational outcome that allows them to experience first-hand the benefits of using your product or service. This includes spots for an upcoming conference or product webinar.
Number Six — Keep things professional at all times: Finally, keep in mind that LinkedIn is first and foremost a network for professional updates and content. So while how you conduct and execute your social media strategy is ultimately up to you, it pays to keep in mind the possible ramifications of posts that are overly personal or (in particular) political; also keep in mind the potential consequences that your company would have to bear.
In other words, LinkedIn requires a different degree of forward-thinking, restraint and self-awareness compared to Instagram, Facebook or Twitter.
While posting photos from your latest vacation would generally be considered “safe” (and in fact, you might even garner “likes” from some parts of your LinkedIn network), other things such as venting about personal relationships/dating life or select hot-button political issues (and you’ll know what these are) is a definite no-no.
“It’s critical that people really understand what LinkedIn is about — connecting and sharing business-related and career-enhancing opportunities. You can’t use it the same way you would other social networks like Instagram or Facebook. What you say and post on LinkedIn can either really help — or hurt — you,” says Gellert.
Sadly though, you’ll see this rule broken more often that is wise by people in your network — and so while posting consistently keeps you top-of-mind to your network when you show up in their feed, it’s sometimes better to say nothing at all if you don’t have anything to say that would not adversely affect your professional relationships.
If you follow the six suggestions in this article, you should find that you’ll be able to more consistently add higher quality leads and connections to your network. Creating an effective LinkedIn profile isn’t easy (and a bit of writing and rewriting) but it pays dividends by opening up opportunities that would have previously been unavailable to you.
HiredHippo is a job platform that matches top talent to the best companies — all without resumes or cover letters. Visit www.hiredhippo.ai to get started and connected to the 90% of jobs making up the hidden job market. We work with top companies such as Telus, Coinsquare and Vend.
