4 Tips for Supercharging Your Business's LinkedIn Profile

In his book Ultimate Guide to LinkedIn for Business, search engine optimization and online marketing expert consultant Ted Prodromou explains how you can use LinkedIn to quickly engage with ideal customers, partners, and employees, showcase your company and attract new opportunities. In this edited excerpt, the author offers some key tips to help you create a LinkedIn profile that gets people clicking.

When people search the internet for your name, your LinkedIn profile will most likely be one of the top search results, so you want to make a great first impression. Your LinkedIn profile provides people with a comprehensive summary of you, your education, work experience, and your achievements. Your LinkedIn profile also links people to other social media properties and websites where you can showcase your expertise.

Your LinkedIn profile consists of:

• Your headline
• Your photo
• Status updates
• Vanity URL
• Summary
• Applications
• Experience
• Education
• Recommendations
• Additional information
• Personal information
• Contact information

These sections are particularly important to your LinkedIn image:

1. Your headline.

Your profile headline is the single most important part of your profile. It will appear next to your name in the search results. As your name appears in the search results, your headline must be compelling enough to make people want to click on your profile to learn more about you. You should never put just your name and company name in your headline.

2. Your photo.

It’s very important to use a professional picture in your LinkedIn profile. First impressions are very important, and people will judge you within a few seconds when they see your LinkedIn profile. Save your casual pictures for Facebook and Twitter. The best LinkedIn profile pictures are engaging and inviting. I recommend a headshot focusing on your smiling face. Your profile will be associated with your company so you want to present a consistent, professional image and not avatars, caricatures, or other images that aren’t congruent with the image you're establishing for you and your business.

Never use your company logo as your personal profile picture. First, it’s not engaging and doesn’t give people a chance to get to know you. Second, it’s a violation of the LinkedIn End User License Agreement.

3. Experience.

Your current position and your past three positions will be displayed in your profile. Up to three additional positions will be displayed if the viewer clicks on View All.

Make sure you add a brief but clear description for each position. Use your target keywords in your description, so you'll be found when people search for your skill sets. If you're going to use the Request Recommendations option, I recommend sending personal invitations to one person at a time something along the lines of this:

I’m sending this to ask you for a brief recommendation of my work that I can include in my LinkedIn profile. If you have any questions, let me know. Thanks in advance for helping me out.

LinkedIn is about building strong personal connections, and using automated tools is not the way to build a strong connection with me or with others. If you want a good recommendation from someone, take the time to write a personal invitation, and you will receive a much better recommendation than you would from a mass invitation.

When asking for a recommendation, make sure you include personal details about how you met, projects you’ve worked on together, and other details about your working relationship. Specify exactly what you want in the endorsement, such as a specific project you worked on together or to highlight a certain skill set of yours. Some people even prefer that you send them a brief endorsement you’ve written about yourself they can edit or modify to save them time.

Notice you can create another professional headline in your Experience section. This lets people instantly get to know you and learn how you can help them when they view your profile.

4. Contact information.

This is the section where you can add links to your website and blog, which will generate lots of web traffic and help your search rankings. Links from popular sites like LinkedIn are very valuable, so you want to use this trick when you enter your website or blog URL.

One of the most common mistakes people make when adding their website or blog URLs is to choose one of the default options like Personal Website or Blog. Choose Company Website so it displays Company Website instead of your actual company name or target keyword phrase. This helps add valuable links and keyword phrases in your LinkedIn profile that will help your Google search rankings.

LinkedIn also lets you add social media feeds to your LinkedIn profile. This lets your profile visitors see what you’re up to on the social media front, such as on Twitter or Google+.

One of the newest additions to your profile is "Publications," where you can display your published books. To use this section, you must have a valid ISBN number for your published book. Your publication listing includes your book title, publisher, publication date, and a description of your book. You can also add a link to your website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or any other website where people can purchase your book.

Your LinkedIn profile is now optimized for the search engines and is ready to promote.

5 Reasons to Have a Photo in Your LinkedIn Profile

Many LinkedIn profiles lack the headshot that is part of a "complete" profile (as defined by LinkedIn). When I talk with job seekers about why they don't have a photo, the words vary, but the message is the same: I'll be eliminated from consideration because of how I look -- too old, too young, wrong sex, wrong race, etc.

Do You Avoid Discrimination by Not Having a Profile Headshot?

Doubt it! The discrimination will happen regardless. The question is the timing of the discrimination.

When I give talks about using social media for job search, I typically run into resistance from some job seekers who don't want their faces visible online. They may already have an almost-complete LinkedIn Profile, but they haven't added the photo.

Typically, they say they prefer to be invisible/unrecognizable because they are protecting their privacy and avoiding being discriminated against because of their age, sex, race, etc. I understand and sympathize with that concern.

However, if someone doesn't want to hire me because of my age (shown by my gray hair), they won't hire me whether they see my gray hair in my LinkedIn photo or in person. So I believe I'm saving my valuable time by making it clear who I am. Then I can focus my efforts where the benefit is more probable.

Why Profile Head Shots Are Necessary

I've observed five important reasons to have a good head shot photo visible on your profiles:

1. Credibility

To be successful today, most professional jobs require knowledge and skill with social media. Profiles without photos are usually either not very active or just plain out-of-date. And very few employers want to hire someone who is so demonstrably clueless.

In addition, many "spam" social profiles exist to sell products or collect information, and those profiles usually either have no photo or the photo is obviously a model or someone extremely attractive in a very professional-looking photo. Recruiters, in particular, are not interested in fictional profiles.

2. Recognition

Someone who already knows you from your past or a recent networking meeting will, hopefully, recognize that photo and know who you are. Also, that friend from your last job (or the job before that) who is looking for you will find you in the long list of people who have the same -- or a very similar -- name.

3. Visibility

According to LinkedIn, complete LinkedIn profiles (which means the profile has a headshot) are 40 times more likely to receive opportunities through LinkedIn than incomplete profiles.

4. Personal Appeal

Any profile is more appealing when a person's face is associated with it. LinkedIn has said that entries in LinkedIn search results with photos beside them are seven times more likely to be clicked than entries without photos. So that recruiter looking for someone with your job title will probably not click on your name unless there is a photo beside it in the search results listings.

5. Personal Branding

When used with your professional activities in social media, your photo represents your brand -- your personal logo -- particularly when you use the same photo for all of your professional social visibility.

What Makes a Successful Profile Photo

LinkedIn has specific requirements, so I recommend starting with LinkedIn. Then, as recommended above, use that photo for your other professional social profiles. TheLinkedIn User Agreement specifies that members should not "upload a profile image that is not your likeness or a head-shot photo."

Be choosy when selecting the photo to use for your professional social profiles. For most of us, that means:

• Use a headshot of yourself, not something or someone else.
• The image should be recognizably you.
• The pose should be relatively "grown-up" -- not mugging for the camera.

LinkedIn wants a simple headshot of you, in a relatively business-like pose. It doesn't need to be an expensive-looking professional photo, but you should be alone in the photo -- no pets, children, or other distractions. The exception is when your career/job involves those pets, children, etc.

More About LinkedIn's Photo and Profile Requirements:

• LinkedIn's Profile Completeness criteria
• LinkedIn's Profile Photo Guidelines and Conditions

Bottom Line

A professional social profile without a nice headshot of you hurts you much more than the lack of one helps you avoid discrimination. So don't skip it. I think of the photos we have in our social media profiles, particularly LinkedIn, as akin to personal logos. I recognize the photos of many colleagues and others from their profiles in the various social networks, and I look for those familiar faces in other settings, both online and off.

What It’s Like To Be Bad At Social Media

How to make the Best Cover Images For Your Social Media Accounts

You can't always judge a book by its cover, but you can judge a social media profile by its cover image. In this column, you’ll learn how to make your own cover images for Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and LinkedIn, including design ideas, correct sizes, and sage file format advice. This is your chance to get creative and let your personality shine—after all, an image is worth a thousand words!

Size Matters

The imagery you use for cover images among social media services doesn’t have to be different, though each service wants slightly different pixel dimensions. While you can crop and reposition the image during the upload process, sizing it correctly ahead of time gives you more control and lets you plan for areas of the image that’ll be covered by your profile picture or text overlay. Below are the currently recommended sizes for today’s popular players (all sizes are in pixels), and while some services accept larger images, the sizes below work well on both desktop and mobile devices:

Facebook: Covers for personal or fan pages are 851x315. Your profile image is shown as overlay in the lower-left, with your name as a text overlay to its right. Facebook Groups have cover images of 801x250.

Twitter: Cover images are 1500x500. Your profile image is shown as overlay in the lower-left, with your name and bio appearing beneath it.

Google+: Cover images are 1080x608. Your profile image, name, and URL are shown to the left of your cover image, not as an overlay.

LinkedIn: LinkedIn’s cover images are 1400x425, but they’re currently for Premium (paid) accounts only. No overlays are shown atop the cover image.

A good profile image features your face or logo in full frame (left). In a full-length body shot, your face is too small to see (right); however, if the image is big enough, you can use the service’s zoom feature during the upload process to fix that.

Profile image sizes vary across services, too, though they’re always fairly small. A good rule of thumb is to upload a portrait-style photo of yourself—or your company’s logo if it’s a business page—and then use the service’s cropping feature to make your head, neck, and shoulders fill the frame.

Building the cover image

To make a great cover image, you need an application that lets you create a custom document size, and add more than one image to that document, as well as text. Such programs include TurboCollage ($5), Pixelmator ($30), Adobe Photoshop Elements ($100), Adobe Photoshop CC ($10/month with an Creative Cloud Photography subscription), and the like. (With enough skill you can do it in Aperture or Lightroom, but that’s fodder for another story—it involves creating a custom paper size in the Print module, designing a new print template, and then using the identity plate and watermarking to add a logo and text.)

Perhaps the easiest program to use is Photoshop Elements 13; it sports a new Facebook Cover option in the Editor’s Create menu that makes a perfectly sized cover (and profile image) from one or more images using a variety of templates.

Both the couple’s photo and the white text to its right are automatic overlays (top). To leave room for that stuff, set a guide in your image editor (bottom).

No matter which application you use, the first step is to create a new document at one of the sizes listed above, generally by choosing File > New and entering the correct dimensions and resolution (use 72ppi). Next, start importing imagery into your document and arrange the important bits so they’re not covered by any overlays the service tacks on. To be safe, don’t set any text inside the bottommost 145 pixels.

What to include

To make the best impression, use odd numbers of your very best images. Choose high-quality images that best reflect your personality or hobby. Use images you’ve shot yourself, purchased from a royalty-free stock image company, or those that are in the public domain or have generous usage rights (NASA’s Visible Earth images, for example). But don’t use images you’ve snatched from the Internet using a Google image search.

If it’s a personal page, give your cover image extra personality by adding a favorite motto, such as “practice aloha” or “It’s 5 o’clock somewhere!” Just keep it clean and keep it short. Remember, the whole world can see this, including current and future friends, family, mates, even bosses.

Including URLs on business cover images makes them easier for visitors to find, shown here on a Facebook fan page (top) and Twitter (bottom).

If it’s a business page, be sure to include your URL and tagline so it’s highly visible. If you have a product for sale, include a picture of it to increase brand recognition.

Save it in the right file format

When you’re finished, first save a master copy of your document in the software’s native format so you can edit it again later. Next, use the software’s File > Save As command to create a JPEG or PNG copy in that you’ll upload to the service itself.

The JPEG format produces a smaller file size, though PNG produces a higher-quality image because no data is lost when it’s compressed. So if your cover image includes a logo or text, use PNG–8. If it includes a large gradient—a smooth transition from one color to another, like in a big sky—use PNG–24, which supports more colors than PNG–8 (and therefore creates a larger file size). For anything else, use JPEG at the highest quality setting.

Facebook is notorious for compressing JPEGs even further during the upload process, so if your cover image looks blurry, try PNG–8 or PNG–24 instead.

Here TurboCollage was used to create this collage (with the exact Facebook blue as a background color). To keep text crisp, save this cover image in PNG format.

Keep these tips in mind, and your social media cover images will look their best and send the right message. Until next time, may the creative force be with you all!

PhotoLesa.com founder Lesa Snider teaches the world to create better graphics. She’s the author of the best-selling Photoshop: The Missing Manual books, coauthor of iPhoto: The Missing Manual, author of The Skinny Book ebook series, a founding creativeLIVE instructor, and regular columnist for Photoshop User and Photo Elements Techniques magazines.

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