LinkedIn is arguably the biggest professional networking site with over 500 million users and is a very important platform when connecting with new business prospects. Having a professionally written LinkedIn profile is crucial as it can help open opportunities and make a good impression on a potential client.
People are sometimes reluctant to use social media in their job search, and forget the concept of LinkedIn. Your LinkedIn profile resembles your CV and should display your education, accomplishments, connections and successes. As with other social media platforms, you can add images to elements of your profile; something that’s usually frowned upon on a CV. Roughly, 90% of what we process is visual, so adding image content will increase the chance of people stopping to look at your profile, and with the decreasing attention span of the modern-day, most recruiters will only spend 10 seconds looking at each profile.
What makes a strong LinkedIn profile for digital marketers? Here are three examples of LinkedIn profiles to learn from.
Neil Patel
Neil Patel is one of the most influential digital marketers and the co-founder of KISSmetrics, Hello Bar and Crazy Egg. He’s assisted major corporations with their marketing, such as Amazon, Microsoft and Airbnb, and is also a New York Times bestselling author, with Forbes saying he’s one of the top 5 marketers in the world. He has many other career triumphs listed under his name and has spoken at over 300 conferences and companies, sharing his knowledge and teaching his marketing tips and tricks. With everything Patel has learned throughout the years, it’s obvious his LinkedIn profile is influential.
So what makes his profile so influential? At first glance, it’s clearly laid out and his header image is eye-catching. His ‘About’ summary is easy to read, as he’s refrained from a paragraph format and listed his accomplishments in short sentences. The sentences are concise and to the point, and by using phrases like “The Wall Street Journal calls me a top influencer”, he can showcase his given titles and achievements without appearing to be bragging.
Aleyda Solís
Aleyda Solis is an international SEO consultant and the founder of Orainti, a specialised, boutique SEO consultancy company. She is the author of ‘SEO, Las Claves Esenciales’, she blogs for influential sites like Search Engine Journal and Moz, and often speaks at global conferences.
From her LinkedIn profile, you can learn from her use of professional photos to grab the attention of possible business connections. Solis has a professional headshot for her profile picture - you want to look the part, if you want to be treated like a professional, you need to look like one. Not only has she chosen a strong profile picture, but her header image displays her in action doing a talk on stage. Look at what’s in your repertoire and chose an image for your header based on that.
Rand Fishkin
Rand Fishkin is the co-founder and CEO of Moz, the all-in-one SEO software suite, but has recently left this role to start a new company, SparkToro, which focuses on connecting businesses with their audiences. He’s also the author of Lost and Founder: A Painfully Honest Field Guide to the Startup World (2018) and is a regular keynote speaker on marketing and entrepreneurship.
His LinkedIn profile is impressive is because he hits the main points that make your profile successful, and still remains incredibly honest doing so. Creating an honest profile means you can get a feel for the personality of a profile, and this is essential to help build trust with connections. He includes a descriptive ‘About’ section, that highlights his career checkpoints clearly, and his profile shows he engages regularly with the site to make his plentiful connections. All his experience and education are listed in a lot of detail, along with a list of articles he has published for LinkedIn, and this is followed by a mass of recommendations.
LinkedIn is an important platform for digital marketers who want to grow their professional network and reach out to potential employers, business partners and clients. But to be successful on LinkedIn, you need to have a great profile, and using these three profiles as inspiration you can develop your own.
This blog was originally published by Digital Marketing Institute. If you enjoyed this blog, read our blog on 7 Invaluable Marketing Skills That Help Teams Produce Consistently Great Content or access all our other blogs here.
