Promoting your business online: LinkedIn

The more professional oriented Social Media Platform called LinkedIn is in our opinion a must have for business owners. LinkedIn allows you to build an online profile based on your professional background, your work experience, education, skills and more. Connect with colleagues, send and receive recommendation, endorse or get endorsed for your skills and start networking with other professionals. You can also create a company page, showcase projects and join groups or become a well known publisher with hopefully a lot of followers. Today in our series Promoting your business online we would like to give you some tips to get your profile started.

Profile Picture
This may sound obvious but you should have a professional looking profile picture. Make sure your face is visible and upload the image in a good quality. After you have uploaded your profile picture you can make some adjustments. Try to make sure that your face is always visible in each of the previews you will find in the adjustment window from LinkedIn.

Skills and Endorsement
You can currently add up to 50 skills to your profile. Try to pick those that describe you best. Start with your strongest skills and keep in mind that you can more later. Depending on your settings your connections will see your profile from time to time with the option to endorse you for those skills. Make sure you are returning the favour and endorse others for their skills.

Recommendations
If someone is writing a recommendation for you, you will always have the option to read the recommendation before publishing it on your profile. Even later you can decide to unpublished a recommendation given by a coworker or business partner. If you receive a recommendation you may want to return the favour. We think recommendations are the best way to show that a real person is behind that online profile.

Work Experience / Education
This can be a bit tricky to find the right way to describe what you do and did before. Should you mention your internship at organization XYZ, which you did 20 years ago? Should you add the position you held at that one company? If you have worked for a long time you may have worked in many different positions and organizations. At some point you may want to remove the positions less relevant to what you do now.

Projects
Very much the same as with the work experience. You may have worked on many different projects and listing all of them would take way to long. You may want to reduce them to a few that stand out and leave out the once less interesting. Their are other platforms available that are much better suited to showcase all of your projects.

Public Profile Settings
Make sure you check your public profile settings and enable only those fields you feel comfortable with showcasing publicly. There is a lot of customization possible. You can for example enable or disable your skills, current position, past positions and language skills to name a few.

Make sure you are presenting yourself always in a professional way on LinkedIn. Connect with new business partners or contacts you made at the last fair as soon as you can to build up your network. The basic account is currently free, but you can have additional features when upgrading and paying for the professional packages, which you may want to check for yourself. We hope this brief overview of LinkedIn was useful. As always if you have any questions feel free to contact us. Check out the links below to learn more about us:

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