How To Guide

How to Build and Activate Your LinkedIn Profile

If you build it... they wont come!

Consider this: you’ve worked hard on crafting your LinkedIn profile. Then, you sit back and wait. Surely, the world will beat a path to your door, right? Unfortunately, this is often not the case. While, Australia is the most active country in the LinkedIn world, the platform will do little for you, unless you systematically activate it and put consistent effort in to building and growing your professional network. 

This guide will give you a plan to build and activate your profile, to enable you to get the most out of LinkedIn, following a three step process:

1. Build your profile & define your value proposition
2. Build your network
3. Activate your profile 

Build your LinkedIn Profile

UPLOAD A PROFESSIONAL PHOTO

It should be a recent photo of you, your face should take up 60% of the photo, wear what you would normally wear to work, and don’t forget to smile!

ADD A BACKGROUND PHOTO

This will grab people’s attention. It can be an image or logo, but it needs to reflect you.

MAKE YOUR HEADLINE MORE THAN A JOB TITLE

This should say, in your words, what it is you do. Job titles are mostly boring and don’t differentiate yourself from your competitors. Make it unique to you.

TURN YOUR SUMMARY INTO A STORY

Make sure you have a summary, and don’t simply list skills, bring to life your own elevator pitch!

EXPERIENCE IS A RESUME SUMMARY

Explain what your current company does, your role there and what impact you’ve had, in that order. Repeat for the previous role with increasing brevity the further you go back in time.

EDUCATION, SKILLS, RECOMMENDATIONS

Yes, yes and yes! Do not skip over these sections, they do matter.

• Work out what your value proposition is – what do you want to be known for? Your content needs to reflect that.
• Avoid buzz words, write as you would talk normally.
• Share media and marketing collateral in your profile that reflects your proposition and passion
  

Build your network

The next step is to build your network. There is no point in having a great profile if you’re only connected to your own business, friends and family!

Your network is your target market, the people and businesses that you’re positioning your personal brand with.

So how do you build your professional network?

Top tips

How many contacts should you have?

You need a minimum of 500 contacts for LinkedIn to work effectively for you, ideally you should aim for around 2000. Our recruitment consultants all have 5,000+. While this seems like a lot, it reflects a fully networked market in a single niche function in Sydney.

What organisations should you connect with?

We recommend making a list of the organisations that interest you along with the job titles at your level. Search by company and by job title and then start sending out invites to connect.

How do you reach out to people?

Personalise your invite - you will double your acceptance rate if you add a note. We recommend using a template that you can cut and paste (save it in Outlook as a draft for ease) – you have 300 characters t make your mark, which is plenty! It is important to be aware that LinkedIn has a limit of 100 contact requests per week.

Do you need to regularly follow up with your connections?

Follow up each new contact with a thank you. Again, it makes it easier to use a pre prepared template for this. If you spend 20-30 mins a day on this, your network will grow very quickly. If you send 100 invites per week and get a 60% acceptance rate, you will have 1,000 new contacts in 4 months.

Activate your profile

So, now that you have a great LinkedIn profile and you’re committing time, daily, to building out your network, what happens next?

The LinkedIn algorithms push the most active participant (that’s a deliberate choice of word), to the top of their network’s home feed. Why does that matter? If you are near the top of a home feed it means the people you are hoping to reach, will see you and your activity more often. That means you’re building your profile. So, how do you do that?

It doesn’t mean spending all your time writing longform blogs and creating great video content. If you have the time, by all means, do that, but the fastest way to get noticed is to repurpose what’s already on LinkedIn.

Follow this plan every day to expand your reach:

• Like and comment on 5 pieces of content. A comment boosts your profile in equal measure to a post with fresh content.
• The more you like and comment on content, the more LinkedIn will serve up similar content to you, so keep on-brand.
• Share 1 piece of content. Make sure it’s relevant to you, your role and the industry or organisations you’re looking to reach / connect with.
• Comments are boosted by the algorithms if you pose a question or @one or more of your contacts in the comment. For example, @name, what do you think of this?

If you need help building your LinkedIn profile or you’re looking to make your next career move, contact the team at [axr] today.

About [axr]

We’re a proudly Australian specialist recruitment consultancy established in 2003. We've built a team of experienced and passionate specialist recruitment consultants who are inspired by the impact exceptional recruitment has on careers and teams.

We see things a little differently at [axr]. Our mission is to prepare people to have better career conversations, to make great career decisions, to enable individuals and organisations to get the best return out of their relationship. This philosophy and approach helps professionals to have strategic career conversations which means better retention of high-potential talent, the right level of staff-turnover and optimised staff attraction and recruitment.

We achieve this by creating pathways between future and current leaders. We have an active talent network who engage with our career incubator programs: The CFO Incubator, Finance to Leadership Incubator, our career podcasts, Your Future in Sales & Marketing, and From Go to CFO to help to build this pathway and, ultimately, create better careers and teams.

At [axr], we focus on building careers not jobs, teams not hires, because if it matters to you, it matters to us.

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