10 LinkedIn Profile Do’s and Don’ts

The LinkedIn profile is simple right?  Just copy and paste a resume and maybe a cover letter in and there you have it.  Doing it RIGHT, without mistakes and making sure you don’t step in any quicksand, is not.  Here is something to get you going and something to keep you out of trouble.

Profile Do’s

1. Treat your LinkedIn profile like a Web site. Make sure it is well-formatted, clean, and, most importantly, of interest to others.  Ask friends to read it and ask them to be very critical in their assessments.  This is not an atta’ boy moment.
2. Populate your LinkedIn Profile with keywords for your background and your industry and for the industries of your CLIENTS.
3. With keywords, be sure to include the variants of the words (teach, teacher, taught, teaching), the synonyms of those words (Speaker, Educator) and the variants of THOSE words (Speaking, Education).
4. Create a LI Profile template using MS Word and have it be your original/master text. It is used to copy/paste the text into your profile.  Even minor changes are made in MS Word and copy/pasted into your profile.
5. Look at using special symbols (│ ▌ ◊ ■ ↔ ♦) to break up your text and ► add emphasis ◄ to key elements.

Profile Don’ts

1. Don’t use anything in your name field that doesn’t belong as part of your name or LinkedIn users will not be able to find you when searching for you by name – Paul A. (Pablo_paul@yahoo.com), PABLO A. vs. Pablo Paul. This is also a violation of the LinkedIn End User License Agreement and you don’t want to be upsetting LinkedIn.
2. Don’t put anything in the picture area but a headshot picture of yourself.  No group pictures, no kids, no spouse, no logo.  A professional photo is not required, just a simple headshot picture from any standard digital camera.  LinkedIn will help you crop it to the required 85×85 pixels.
3. Don’t use the defaults for web sites – My Company, My Web site, etc.  Put a custom label in place of this text by selecting the “Other” option from the same pull down menu used to select My Company, My Web site, etc.  It pops up a new field for you to put in a custom label.  It is OK to point to specific sub-pages on a Web site.
4. Don’t just include recent jobs as you may be tempted to do.  Put in all of your work history back to college days.  This gives you more inroads to create more relationships with others.
5. Don’t use paragraphs larger than 5 lines as they are show in the View Profile option.  Break up paragraphs with 6 or more lines into multiple paragraphs.