At ScholarNet, our team uses LinkedIn regularly – and you probably do too. It’s easy to forget about updating our profiles. To keep your profile in tip-top shape, here are some strategies to improve your LinkedIn presence.
LinkedIn is a great platform for connecting with friends and colleagues, sharing information about your profession, and building your personal brand. The ScholarNet team also uses LinkedIn to build a forum with other financial aid professionals, sharing expertise and experience to help make all of our jobs easier.
We use LinkedIn pretty regularly, but we know from experience that it’s easy to forget about updating your LinkedIn profile. We’re all busy, but it’s important to check up on your profile now and then, because it’s an important part of how colleagues and employers see you. To polish your profile, we’ve gathered the following tips on improving your LinkedIn presence.
Pick the right pictures.
The profile picture is your first impression on LinkedIn. To make this impression a pleasant one, make sure to use a fairly recent, professional profile picture that has a simple, neutral background. While you can be a little more casually dressed – you don’t have to be wearing formal business attire in the picture – it should be something you would wear to work. Also make sure to add a nice background picture that will compliment your profile picture. Your background picture could be related to your school, or something else you’re interested in, as long as it blends in well with your profile.
Tell a story with your profile.
Try to use the “About” section and other fields like your “Background” and “Accomplishments” to give visitors to your profile a vivid glimpse into your life. Adding details that make it more than just statements of what you’ve done and where you’ve been will bring your story to life. When your profile stands out, more people will engage and interact with you, helping your network grow stronger.
Make more connections.
It’s important to grow your network so you have more professional connections to share with and learn from. You never know who could lead you to a new opportunity. You can sync your profile with your email contacts to find more people you already know.
Take a skill assessment.
There are a variety of assessments today that determine what exactly you’re good at, and how that relates to your work life. This can be a useful way for you to see how workplace tendencies might shift depending on your strengths and weaknesses. You can take one of these assessments through LinkedIn, and share the results on your profile. This is a good way to share more insight about yourself, get others to engage with your post and profile, and learn more about your contacts.
Share more relevant content.
Making more connections is great, but sharing and engaging with more content can help you build stronger connections with your LinkedIn network. Sharing relevant news and updates helps those in your industry learn more about what’s new and upcoming, and how best to prepare for it. Sharing more also leads to more conversations about how others are approaching these developments, and we can learn from each other as a forum develops from these conversations. Those of us working in financial aid know this collaboration makes our jobs easier.
Maintain and update your profile throughout the year.
It’s easy to just set and forget about your profile once you think it looks good, but it’s also important to review it every now and then. You could have something new to add that your network would like to know about, whether it’s a new position, or even just a pretty new headshot to use as your profile picture. Periodically refreshing your profile will help to keep your network in the loop on how your professional life is going.
Connect with us on LinkedIn to share more profile tips and financial aid expertise with your peers.