“LinkedIn is the network for professionals with more than 722 million members worldwide”
LinkedIn is one of the most important social networking sites for professional networking, business, and selling. With the importance of Linkedin rising so much in the current scenario, it is important to have a strong personal brand on LinkedIn. But people still don’t know how to optimize LinkedIn profiles for maximum exposure.
LinkedIn is a popular social network but it is more than just a social network. It is a huge database of businesses and professionals. Besides, it is the fastest-growing professional network in 2021. People use it to network with each other and search for jobs. In this blog, we will discuss how to optimize your LinkedIn profile for job search.
The use of LinkedIn has been increasing rapidly over the years, Linkedin is one of the platforms where you can have your own professional identity by maintaining a strong personal brand.
It is the most important social media site for posting and getting traffic to your business. And there is no doubt that it will continue in the future more than now. However, you should enable business data and optimize your LinkedIn profile to get more success.
It is used for job searching, employee recruiting, networking, and other professional purposes. In this blog, we will look at the importance of a LinkedIn profile in the year 2021. We will also discuss the growth of LinkedIn and why it has become imperative for entrepreneurs to have an optimized LinkedIn profile.
Why should you optimize your LinkedIn profile?
LinkedIn is gaining importance as a tool that can be used for professional and personal use. The importance of LinkedIn will only increase in the future and it will be an important medium for reaching out to prospective customers and employers. This is why it is important to optimize your LinkedIn profile and understand how it can be used.
Using LinkedIn has helped people to find jobs efficiently. Moreover, professionals can look forward to amazing business opportunities through this platform. Most of the standardized companies use LinkedIn as the medium for their employees to stay in touch with each other.
It is a great place to meet business clients and a great platform for your business to find your target audience, without spending too much on SEO.
Now we all know that LinkedIn is an important resource for professionals and if you’re not using it effectively to grow your brand and business, you’re missing out. The more information available, the greater chance of your business getting exposure and growing. If you still doubt even once about not optimizing your LinkedIn profile then have a look at these data that will definitely make you optimize yours.
Some mind-blowing stats on LinkedIn-
- After the hit of the coronavirus pandemic, the availability of remote jobs on LinkedIn has increased 2.5x from March to October in 2020. There are more work-from-home job opportunities as compared to the previous years.
- LinkedIn now has more than 722+ million active users.
- LinkedIn is available in 24 different languages that makes it more prominent in every part of the world.
- As a result, LinkedIn users are spread in more than 200 countries around the world.
- LinkedIn is the most privacy-protected platform as compared to other social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram and others.
- Around 59.9% of LinkedIn users are between the age of 25 to 34 years old. This makes it a fully professional platform as all these people between this age are either the ones finding new job opportunities or the ones who are looking for employees to grow their business.
- About 40 million people use LinkedIn for job search every week.
- The number of active users and content creation on limiting has increased by 60% in 2020. And it is still increasing in 2021.
- About 61 million LinkedIn users are senior-level influencers that make decisions.
- Out of 4 people, 3 are hired every minute on LinkedIn.
- 2021 became the first year LinkedIn hit its 50% milestone of users.
The value of LinkedIn is high in today’s marketing. It is the base of all dealings. It is the fastest growing social media site after Facebook.
Here is the comprehensive step-by-step guide for creating your professional Linkedin profile. This guide will help you design your profile, maintain your profile, use your profile and get stunning job and freelancing opportunities with the help of your profile.
How to optimize LinkedIn profile for maximum exposure?
Step by step guide-
1. Fill in your complete details-
LinkedIn directors say: “Users with complete profiles are 40 times more likely to receive chances through LinkedIn”
A completely filled LinkedIn profile stands out more than millions of profiles that are just created with few details. When talking about an optimized LinkedIn profile, every section of your profile must be filled with relevant information. So, make sure that while creating a LinkedIn profile you must not leave any section unfilled.
2. Gain all-star batch in your profile-
LinkedIn gives a star batch to all its users according to the information filled in their LinkedIn profile and categorizes them according to their profile strength. These 5 levels of the profile are:-
- Beginner
- Intermediate
- Advanced
- Expert
- All-star
It appears right on the dashboard of your profile page although it’s private to you but you should make sure that you get an all-star batch.
From a total of 5 stars, a profile can get all 5 stars by filling each section of your profile, listing relevant jobs, experience, education, and at least 5 skills.
3. A relevant headline-
The headline is the most important line that your recruiters see at the first glance at your profile. Be clear as a crystal while defining your headline and try to be creative while describing it.
Including a keyword in your headline about what you do or for what role you are looking for is a must thing to do. Avoid overuse of buzzwords with your keywords and keep it short and crisp.
4. A clear about section-
LinkedIn allows you to tell your story through your ‘about section’. It’s like a resume or a summary of your profile. You can write your relevant and perfect summary in 2000 characters or less.
This section is not just used for telling your experiences, jobs, skills, and things related to your career but it is the most important section to tell your story in a unique way that hooks your reader. Many people leave this section blank and this creates not a good impression on the recruiter’s mind. If you haven’t written your crisp and impactful “about section” yet then it’s high time to make out time and write the right one for you.
5. Fill your experience section-
The main motive of yours to be on LinkedIn is to search for a job, right?
For this, LinkedIn has provided a very unique section in optimizing someone’s LinkedIn profile called ‘experience’. Here you can add all your past experiences related to your career and job. Besides, you can also update it with your current job position to let your recruiters know what you were doing and what you are doing now while having a look at your profile. If you are someone who is actively looking for job searches or freelance opportunities you must not miss filling this experience section.
6. Mention your skills-
Skills are for what you get hired on LinkedIn. The most important thing is to have skills that are going to get you a job. Make sure you use this section well to demonstrate all your skills that are relevant to your job search.
It is recommended to focus on hard skills rather than soft skills. By hard skills, I mean to focus on those skills in which you have your expertise and through which you can stand out of the crowd. You should better avoid mentioning soft skills that are not relevant to your job and that are not going to help you in finding jobs and opportunities that you are looking for.
7. Showcase your achievements using “feature section”-
LinkedIn gives you an option to feature your top post that did extremely well or something that shows your achievement and success in your field at the top of your profile. Using this section to feature your portfolio or achievements will be a plus point to show your ability and credibility to your recruiters.
8. Get recommendations and endorsement on skills-
Recommendations are a great way to increase your credibility in the eyes of your audience or recruiters. Getting recommendations from people that are already doing good in your industry can definitely make your audience build trust in you.
You can ask for recommendations from your colleagues or people that have known you. A better way to get recommendations is from the people you have worked with previously.
9. Use of relevant keywords-
No matter what you are into, keywords have always been an important thing to consider. Use of keywords is not enough instead use of proper relevant keywords is a must-have point.
While creating a LinkedIn profile you must keep in mind to use relevant keywords everywhere including your headline, about section, experiences, and skills. This helps the LinkedIn algorithm to find you for jobs and opportunities that are related to your keyword and give a push notification to you at the proper time. It also helps you in ranking at the top results while your recruiters are searching for that particular role that you have mentioned in your profile using keywords.
10. Show license or certificates of achievements if any.
LinkedIn is a platform where the more you show off your success and achievements, the more are your chances to get opportunities out of it. As already mentioned above, LinkedIn has more than 61 million decision-makers that are always hanging over LinkedIn to find innovative and creative minds to grow their business.
Showing off your license and certificate of achievements can actually help you in building a strong professional identity that attracts recruiters. In this way, you can get many inbound job opportunities without moving a hand for it.
11. Be active and consistent
Being active on LinkedIn is an essential part of optimizing a LinkedIn profile. Also, it’s not just about scrolling through LinkedIn and seeing what others are doing. You need to continuously engage with other people by reacting and leaving genuine comments on their posts.
And being consistent means in terms of creating content. You must not act like a crazy stalker watching others doing well. Showing up on everyone’s feed by creating content is the only way to get opportunities through LinkedIn.
12. Networking – Build genuine relations and not just connections
Last but not the least, networking is the most crucial part of Linked optimization.
How?
Connecting with people from your industry and those whom you want to work with builds a strong professional network that helps you to get more opportunities. Before the LinkedIn algorithm or anything, after all, we are connecting with real humans who have emotions. They are there either looking for job opportunities or recruiting someone to grow their businesses. The main motive of building connections is building relations and not just increasing one more connection to your network.
“Leverage the power of LinkedIn and convert it into a lead generating machinae.”
LinkedIn optimization is not such a big thing as people think and make it. By following these simple steps, one can set up a fully optimized LinkedIn profile and get thousands of opportunities right sitting from your home doing nothing.
After the hit of the global coronavirus pandemic and with the advent of technology, a lot has been changed just in a span of few months jumping from 2020 to 2021. LinkedIn has also played a major role in these tough times by serving as a trusted medium between job seekers and recruiters.
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