Posts Tagged ‘professionalism’
Tips to Optimize Your LinkedIn Profile and Manage Your Personal and Professional Brands
Tuesday, May 26th, 2009
I visited my Facebook page this afternoon and NOT to my surprise, I had been tagged in a picture sitting at dinner with some friends…drinking a beer. Now normally I would be okay with this, but after an Ad Club event I attended a few weeks back, it made me wonder if I should leave it up or not. We are all adults and aware of networking groups, happy hours, events and the like but is actually displaying it unprofessional. And besides the fact that my close friend is throwing up some sort of ad agency gang sign, do you think I should untag this photo because of that? Has my personal brand or companies brand been tainted?
As a professional in the business world and an online marketer, my life (personally and professional) is all connected. Between my Facebook profile which is linked to my company site, which is in the signature of my email located right above my LinkedIn profile address, there is no way that a prospective client or vendor can’t find out anything and everything about me with the click of a mouse.
With that said, no matter what your professional intentions are with sites such as LinkedIn, Twitter or Facebook, it is important to dot all of your “i’s”, cross every last “t”, and keep it professional (or at least PG) at all times.
Here a few tips to optimize your LinkedIn presence:
You know that status thing that you sometimes update on your facebook page? We’ll it’s on LinkedIn as well…USE IT. It will increase your visibility and search engine optimization of your page.
Do you notice how your job title is the first thing besides your name that comes up when visiting your LinkedIn Page? Make that a description of you or your objective (just like what you have on your resume). That gives someone a fair opportunity to judge who you are and what you’re about and decide whether or not they want to scroll through the rest of your page
If you haven’t already, edit your URL to your name. Again, SEO.
Write your summary for 2 target audiences: an employer or client AND GOOGLE. In the instance of looking for a new position, just copy and paste your resume (assuming that your resume is action keyword optimize for those companies that use computer programs to scan them). SEO is huge when people are scanning your profile for relevancy and qualifications.
Now although I just said, “copy and paste your resume”, FOCUS on the future. Write about your goals, vision or the mission you want to achieve by utilizing a networking tool such as LinkedIn. Your past work history will be interesting to most people to an extent but no one wants to read your Job Obituary.
(Let’s throw in a Facebook tip since their probably connected somehow) If you haven’t gotten this one yet, un-tag yourself in photos that you wouldn’t want a prospective client or employer seeing. And if it was posted by you, take it down.
Join related groups! And when you’re a member of a group, participate in discussions: ask questions, forward interesting articles and links, post helpful tips, etc (Its called interactive for a reason).
This blog posting is truly just a small piece of the tip of the iceberg. Visit http://learn.linkedin.com/ to learn more about optimizing your profile and using this tool to its full potential.
Tags: facebook, LinkedIn, online marketing, professionalism, search engine optimization
Posted in Branding, LinkedIn, Search engine marketing, Uncategorized | 2 Comments »