Colorado Concert Scene

For the latest in what’s happening in the Denver area concert and festival scene, visit Mike O’Neil’s personal blog.

LinkedIn Data Field Lengths revealed

So, just how much “Real Estate” do I have to work with on my LinkedIn Profile?

I had a project recently to find out just how much space we have to work with in each field on LinkedIn. It lets you know where the lines are drawn and that can help a lot in making you most visible.  We always suggest that you create and maintain your master LinkedIn profile text in MS Word and then cut and past the text into LinkedIn.

So, just how much space does LinkedIn give you in a profile anyway?  I did a little testing and here is what I found:

Picture - 85 pixels by 85 pixels (after cropping) using a professional photo
Headline/Header - 120 Characters
Summary – 2,000 Characters (about 2/3 of a printed page)
Specialties – 500 Character
Company Name - 90 Characters
Job Title – 100 Characters
Job Description – 1,000 Characters
Education Activities and Societies – 500 Characters
Education Additional Notes – 1,000 Characters
Custom Web site URL Tag (Other) – 30 Characters
Interests – 1,000 Characters
Groups and Associations – 1,000 Characters
Honors and Awards – 1,000 Characters
Contact Settings – Lots, but no way to effectively tell how many – really

A fully optimized Profile is one of the keys to being found and helps you find new opportunities using LinkedIn.  So, we’ve developed the IA LinkedIn® Workshops and Webinars to teach you how to craft an extremely effective LinkedIn profile, how to begin building your network, how to avoid the numerous LinkedIn pitfalls, how to search for people and resources and how to BEHAVE on LinkedIn so you don’t get in trouble.

Check out my fully built-out LinkedIn profile for ideas on improving yours

Recommendations for Getting and Making LinkedIn Recommendations

There are recommendations and then there are RECOMMENDATIONS and then, for the majority, there are no recommendations.  It isn’t easy to enter in to the world of LinkedIn recommendations without knowing the way.

 

There is an art of recommendations and then there is a culture around it.  At IA, we are artists and there are many others, many are career coaches.

Here is our unique wizardry on recommendations.  I would like to hear what you think about it.  We teach this methodology in our LinkedIn training.

Pick the right person – only request recommendations from people that you actually had business dealings with.  Good idea is to look at successful projects and who else was involved.  Job titles are important, so are company names.  Pick people that you could recommend as well.

Tell them what they might cover – Suggest a specific project.  “You might say something about the Marketing  database conversion we did last year.  A couple of statistics and something about how I helped make it successful is all it takes.  I will return the favor if you like.  Thanks a lot!”

Return the favor – you will be automatically asked/encouraged to reciprocate.  In most cases, you will want to do this, especially if you picked the right person in the first place.

Some examples:

“Bob and I worked on a data conversion project in 2003.  We has 12 cities to convert from .Net to MySQL in a month.  Bob made sure the project got done right.  We have worked on other projects together as a result.”

“Tony worked for me as a Sr. Account Manager at Sprint for 2 years.  He worked with 10 of the top 40 accounts in Colorado.  He always exceeded goals and made those around him more successful in the process.”

“We hired Mike to train our team of 30 outside sales reps. On LinkedIn.  Mike delivered a vibrant program with play by play instruction that has already helped our team open new doors and close new deals.”

Look at this as a place for testimonials that you might use elsewhere in your marketing. Note that the testimonial text from others is not searchable using LinkedIn keyword searches.

As a result of being recommended and recommending others you now have links to and from other the LinkedIn profile of others that you personally selected.  This is a sort of super-connection between you.  You have increased your visibility in the LinkedIn world and in the Google world.

Look at the 100+ recommendations on my profile at:

www.linkedin.com/in/mikeoneil

 

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.