Enhancing Your LinkedIn Profile and Page

LinkedIn profiles showcase your work and educational experience, your skills and achievements, and all the details one might find in a professional resume or curriculum vitae. While it may be easier to simply copy and paste the text out of your resume into your LinkedIn account, think about ways to convey your capabilities and personal brand through other media.

Add a clear, appealing photograph of yourself to your LinkedIn profile that properly conveys the professional image you want to project. Don’t stop at a profile image alone. LinkedIn gives you the ability to upload a background image as well as a variety of media files to different sections of your profile including the Summary and under each work experience listing and education entry.

Approved file types for LinkedIn include .pdf, .ppt, .doc, .rtf, .png, .jpg, .bmp, .tiff and .gif but not animated gifs. You can also link to specific files and pages on other websites such as YouTube and SlideShare (owned by LinkedIn) to add more multimedia elements to your profile to better showcase your work.

Here’s a summary of some of the files you can upload to your LinkedIn Profile to enhance it:

Graphics - Think logos, book covers, or other images pertaining to your business. If you’re a florist, upload images of floral arrangements and a link to your website. If you’re an artist, upload samples of your illustrations or an advertising campaign portfolio. Consider adding Infographics, a popular graphic style for visualizing data.

Photographs - Upload photographs that you’ve taken or carefully selected stock photography to represent a concept or theme.

Slides and Documents – Convert your presentation files to either Adobe PDF (.pdf), Open Office Presentation (.odp) or Microsoft PowerPoint (.ppt and variations of their slide file format).

Video – Link to a video on your YouTube account to pull it into your profile and add a description. Appropriate videos include product demos, tours of your business location, or informational ones that showcase your expertise.

Blogging on LinkedIn

Another way to showcase your knowledge and expertise is to publish posts to your LinkedIn blog. These blog posts or “articles” appear on your LinkedIn profile and are pushed out to your Connections who can like, comment and share them with others.

Enhance your published content on your LinkedIn blog by adding rich media such as:

Images – Upload or drag and drop images from your computer into your articles. Don’t have a suitable image? Peruse Flickr's Creative Commons photo inventory and insert appropriate ones into your piece. Make sure to provide credit for images that aren’t yours.

Video – Copy and paste the YouTube URL where your video is housed to embed it into an article.

Slides – House your presentation slides on SlideShare then copy and paste the URL for a presentation you’d like to embed into an article.

Social Media – If the image you’d like to include is already published to your Instagram account, copy the specific image’s URL and paste it to pull the image into your article. You can do the same for a tweet by copying the exact URL that leads to a specific tweet.

Promote Your Company Through LinkedIn Pages

LinkedIn provides free Company Pages, similar to Facebook Pages, for businesses large and small. A LinkedIn Company Page offers limited features and design customization, but having a presence for your company on LinkedIn can help you reach current and potential customers on a professional network.

A LinkedIn Company Page includes the following features:

Home Page: Visitors land on your company page by clicking on your company name in your profile or conducting a search on LinkedIn. This landing page is similar to a Facebook Page where you have a “cover” image or branded banner at the top, a news feed consisting of posts you publish, and the ability for people to follow your Page as well as like or comment on your posts.

Groups: If you have created or manage a LinkedIn Group, you can add a link to it on your Page to tie it into your LinkedIn presence and help promote it.

How You’re Connected: This feature shows visitors to your Page a list of the employees that have connected their profiles to your company and how they are connected to them. Encourage your team members to add a link to your company page to their professional profiles so they are listed on the page.

Careers: If you have a job opening at your company, you can advertise it on LinkedIn and add it to your LinkedIn Page.

Analytics: Review how each of your posts on your page perform in terms of views and interactions. From the Analytics section, you can “sponsor” or boost a post using LinkedIn’s self-serve advertising tool to reach a wider audience.

To connect a LinkedIn profile to your Company Page, edit the current employment listing and retype your company’s name. A pop-up menu should appear with a list of companies with similar names. Choose your company from the list to activate the link between your profile and your Company Page.

Treat your LinkedIn Profile and Company Page as networking tools to help generate business leads. Upload and publish business-appropriate content that showcases who you are and what you do to establish and grow a professional online presence.