Your LinkedIn Profile can be your optimal DIGITAL aid to networking… like your GPS to guide you through all the necessary networking.
This week’s session: Your LinkedIn Primer–TASK#1 Your Profile
Thursday, January 29th, 8:45 AM at The Egg and I Restaurant in Addison
As I see it, there are two central functions that you must pay attention to, on a regular basis for the rest of your career… and a third when you are actively seeking work.
- TASK#1 Your Profile
- TASK#2 Developing your network
- TASK#3 Identifying jobs and other opportunities
You can ‘design’ your Profile to draw interested parties TO YOU… this is called a ‘pull marketing’ effort and is heavily dependent on your search engine optimization (SEO) score. This is an over-simplification, but the name of that game is to find creative ways to stack your keywords, using every allowable boundary of LinkedIn.
The challenge is to create this heavy barrage of keywords in a less than obvious manner, so that your Profile is still reader-friendly to those potential contacts, recruiters, or hiring authorities.
On the other hand, you may elect to use your Profile to get your story out to potential interested contacts, recruiters, or hiring authorities. This would be utilizing a ‘push marketing’ design and would integrate a more narrative approach, with all due grammar in place…making it much more reader-friendly.
The challenge is to create such a narrative ‘storyline’ which still has sufficiently high SEO score to rank you in the first several pages of a keyword search aimed at an individual like you… yet still narrative enough to be reader-friendly for those that take the time to read through “your story.”
I encourage the Candidates that I serve to get the best of BOTH marketing approaches—both push and pull marketing strategies. Remember, the LinkedIn search algorithm looks for your activity level FIRST and your SEO score SECOND (a close second)… so let your desired results be your guide.
While your Profile page will detail your work history, don’t assume you can copy and paste your resume and be done with it. Your profile page should reflect your professional interests, passions, and ambitions at this point in your career. It’s not a mistake to start with cutting and pasting from your resume. It becomes the core of this high tech, written ‘personal marketing’ collateral.
…But then edit your storyline and personality back in to it.
How can one accomplish this critical element of your Personal Marketing Plan, your ‘digital footprint?’ Use the time you spend on LinkedIn to address your two critical tasks:
1. Task #1 is to keep your profile as a dynamic reflection of what you learn from your networking experience, tweaking your way to better search page results. This is worth more time in the beginning of your career transition, but regular time throughout.
2. Task#2 is to be interactive by participating in appropriate Group discussions, ‘like-ing’ comments of your choice, private messaging the writers of those comments as potential new contacts, following targeted Companies, and regularly ‘updating your network by ‘share-ing’ articles or posting brief ‘white papers’ than express your knowledge and expertise.
Set your job search habits to take full advantage of LinkedIn’s ever-changing algorithm and functionality. LinkedIn can be your ‘digital roadmap’ to finding new contacts and being found!
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